Hackamore 10 : Tamales and Beans
by StarryDiadem
Summary: The story continues, seen through the eyes of the ranch foreman - a tag for the pilot, High Riders.
1. Chapter 1

Part One

Cipriano Roldán slipped into the chair beside his wife's and took her hand in his. With the other he took Arturo's, lifting the heavy hand from where it rested on the old man's shattered chest.

Arturo's breath was failing him.

When the battle for Lancer was won, Cipriano had known the instant he'd bent over his old compadre that Arturo was beyond help in this world. Indeed, he was astonished that Arturo was still breathing. He'd seen the old vaquero fall from the walls of the hacienda, clutching at his chest and letting his rifle drop. Cipriano hadn't been able to do anything right then but to shoot again and again at Pardee's evil men, hoping that one of the perros that he hit with his bullets was the coward who had shot Arturo.

When the cobardes had fled, when Pardee was dead with Señor Scott's bullet in his black heart, Cipriano had looked first to assure himself that his sons were unhurt and had then run to reach Arturo. Eduardo had spat out a curse and run with him, Jaime following on close behind. Let the others, let Toledano and Mano, Carlos and Matteo run to help Señor Scott bring his injured hermano into the hacienda; they were vaqueros with no other duty than to the Patrón and it was right and proper that they help the sons. Cipriano, though, owed Arturo the duty of a son or a nephew and that came first, even before his obligation to the Patrón. He had gathered up the old vaquero into his arms with his sons' help and carried him to his own house, his eyes burning.

"The doctor said that Arturo is in no pain and that he won't wake now," whispered Bella, telling the rosary with her free hand. "Did you ask someone to go for the priest?"

"I sent Frank, but the Padre won't get here in time," said Cipriano, stoical in the face of death. It did not worry him, the way it might worry the very pious, that the priest would be too late to administer a last absolution. Arturo didn't need it. He was a good old man, a simple man who did no harm, with a pure and loving heart. Cipriano knew that the good Dios would overlook what small sins remained since Arturo's last confession to cast their insignificant stains on the old man's soul, and accept him into His heaven with open arms and the kiss of welcome. It could not be otherwise.

Bella nodded, her fingers slipping over the carved ivory beads and her lips moving silently with prayers so familiar that the words sank unnoticed into the mind and heart like rain into the parched earth, and brought refreshment. She, too, knew that Arturo was a good man. Her prayers, though, would comfort what little remained of Arturo that might still be able to hear her and know he was being farewelled, as he left on his long journey, with love and respect and the proper observances.

Eduardo and Jaime slipped into the room. Cipriano felt the pressure of a hand on his shoulder for a moment, as Eduardo passed by him to sit on the other side of the bed to his parents. Jaime stood behind his brother, looking uncomfortable. Eduardo thought of Arturo as his _abuelo_, loved him dearly and had named his own son for him; Jaime was fond of Arturo, surely, but there was not the same bond. Eduardo's eyes were wet and he wiped them with the back of his hand. Cipriano managed a faint smile for him, to tell Eduardo that he need not be ashamed of honest tears for the beloved dying and dead. The smile he gave Jaime was to reassure, for the young one had seen too much death that morning and Cipriano had seen how his gentle son's hands had trembled when the last of Pardee's men had fled.

"What of the others?" asked Bella, her fingers stilling between one decade of the rosary and the next. Cipriano saw how her eyes showed her thankfulness that both their sons were unhurt. Although she had known it, still she looked them over almost greedily to reassure herself, before her upright posture relaxed the tiniest amount. He increased the pressure of his hand a little in comfort and the boys, seeing their mother's glance, both managed small smiles for her, too overwhelmed in the face of Death to do more. It had been a trying morning for her, and a dangerous one, and its ending was bitter-sweet.

"Señor Johnny is badly hurt, I think, but the others aren't so bad. The doctor has gone up to the hacienda to see to him. He'll have a lot of work to do tod—"

Cipriano broke off as Arturo's breath hitched in his throat and faltered. He leaned forward, watching intently, aware that Eduardo mirrored him on the other side of the bed. Jaime shifted his weight uncomfortably, his boots dragging on the polished wooden floor. Cipriano was aware, too, of the soft murmur of Bella's voice as she restarted her rosary, praying Arturo out of this life and into the everlasting life that is to come.

Another hitching, half-strangled breath. And another. Another breath. A pause. And another, fainter and ever more difficult.

Death stood at the foot of the bed, waiting.

"Vaya con Dios, tio mio," said Cipriano softly, releasing Bella's hand to place his on the old man's brow. "You are much loved by us and by God, who awaits you. You will be remembered in my heart."

There was no more. Arturo slipped away quietly between one breath and the one that should have come next but did not, his hand in Death's, and with nothing but a soft sigh to mark his passing.

After a moment, Cipriano sat back. He carefully replaced the old man's hand on his breast and patted it. He smoothed the patchwork quilt covering Arturo's empty shell, holding his mouth shut tight against the protests it would utter to God. Eduardo sat with his head bowed. Jaime swallowed visibly and turned to stare out of the window, looking across the vegetable gardens to the courtyard at the back of the hacienda where his old playmate lay with a bullet in his back.

Without interrupting her prayer, Bella handed Cipriano a folded square of soft linen; one of her best handkerchiefs, covered in the exquisite embroidery that had cost her many hours of labour, the threads pulled and whipped with silk until it looked like lace. Cipriano unfolded it and gently laid it over Arturo's face, glad that the old man had been so deeply unconscious that he hadn't had to commit the ultimate betrayal and close Arturo's eyes on the world of light.

"…pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death." Bella's soft voice said in his ear. Her eyes were as wet as Eduardo's, but her voice had never faltered. She had owed it to Arturo not to falter.

Cipriano couldn't speak his amen, but he nodded it.

xoxo

xoxo

Cipriano made his way up to the hacienda, walking through the gardens that Arturo had helped to tend when he grew too old to ride to herd cows, and past the little room in the courtyard where Arturo had lived in contentment until Pardee came. He had left Eduardo and Jaime to speak to José, the estancia's carpenter. José was a busy man, that day and Cipriano, too, had duties.

The Patrón and his eldest son were in the great room with Señorita Teresa. The Patrón was stumping up and down the room, leaning on his cane, his face terrible with anxiety and fear. He nodded but did not speak when Cipriano came in. Cipriano concluded that Doctor Jenkins was still trying to get the bullet out of the younger son's back, with the help of the housekeeper, Maria Morales.

Señor Scott watched the Patrón going back and forth, his mouth in a tight line and his eyes weary. Looking at him, Cipriano felt his own weariness; they had ridden hard and long the previous night to trick Pardee and yet still win back to the hacienda in time to defend it, and none of them had yet managed to sleep. Well, Dios willing, they would soon.

"I didn't notice," Señor Scott said as Cipriano entered the room. "He was half-dressed when he came charging into my room yesterday morning, but I've just realised how clever he was at making sure that I saw nothing. He had his shirt half on—the right side, of course, to hide that bruise—and he kept his back to me until he'd covered it."

"Scott—" said the Patrón, waving Cipriano into a chair.

"I should have realised," said Señor Scott. "But he was so bumptious and annoying that of course that's what took my attention." He shook his head. "I thought he was a little thin, you know, but it just didn't register."

"Scott—" said the Patrón.

"How stupid can I be? When I saw what state he was in this morning—"

"Scott, enough. We don't know what happened to him, but it's hardly your fault that you didn't see it earlier. It's not as though he was willing to tell us." The Patrón sighed, and Cipriano knew what it cost him to say what he said next: "He doesn't know us and he doesn't trust us."

"He's trusting us now," said Señor Scott, glancing at the kitchen door.

"I think he's trusting you." The Patrón punctuated his words with a thump of his cane on the floorboards. Cipriano looked to see if it left a mark that José would have to polish out later.

Señor Scott shook his head, and his smile was thin and wry. "Not that much. He's not the confiding sort, is he, our Johnny?"

"I don't think he'd have lasted long as a gunfighter if he was," said the Patrón, heavily. "But don't underestimate what you achieved today with him, Scott. I don't think that any of us would have enjoyed Sam digging that bullet out of him while he was awake, and without you, he'd have refused that chloroform. If Sam had had to wait until he passed out, it might have been too late or at least made Johnny's chances much worse. Johnny's trusted you with his life."

Señorita Teresa, who had been sitting quietly and listening, was paler than usual. "Why would he refuse the chloroform? It doesn't make any sense!"

"He's learned never to let anyone have an advantage over him," said the Patrón, his eyes grim.

Teresa shook her head. The life of a _pistolero_ was beyond the _nina_'s comprehension, thought Cipriano, who knew that she was an innocent for all his disapproval of the licence the girl was given—no daughter of his, had the little Isabella lived (Dios keep her with His angels), would have worn britches like a man.

"He's had a rough time recently," said the Patrón. "I wish he'd tell us what happened to him." He added, glumly, "I don't think he will."

"Remember the first night and how he ate? I thought… forgive me, sir, but it's obvious that Johnny hasn't had much education, and I thought it was just bad manners. But it wasn't, was it? I remember him saying that he'd been living on trail rations until he got here. He was travelling on horseback, wasn't he, until his horse went lame just south of the Morro Coyo road. I don't suppose that means he could carry much in the way of supplies. He only had the saddlebags."

"No," said the Patrón. "Beef jerky or pemmican, maybe, and beans."

"Oh, poor Johnny!" said Señorita Teresa.

"I wouldn't say that to his face, Teresa. I've a feeling my little brother's pride would be hurt."

"I'll talk to Maria about it when this is all over. We'll soon fatten him up a bit." Teresa looked apologetically at Señor Scott. "No more fancy food for your sake, I'm afraid, Scott."

Señor Scott looked briefly astonished. "Uh… really… that's all right," he said.

Cipriano gathered that something had happened to Señor Johnny beyond having Pardee's bullet in his back. He wasn't surprised. He had fond memories of the little Juanito, very fond memories, but he didn't yet know what to make of Johnny Madrid. At least, he didn't yet know how to get past the instinctive prejudice a man of honour had for the hired killer, to see the man behind the gun. What little he knew of pistoleros suggested that few men would know what to make of Johnny Madrid other than what Madrid permitted them to see, and that would be little enough of the man who lived in hiding behind the name. But from what he had seen and what the pistolero had allowed him to know, Cipriano thought that Señor Johnny would be the kind of man who had things happen around him or to him or who made things happen. Whether they were good things remained to be seen, but the morning's events, where Señor Johnny had made things happen with a vengeance, suggested that at the least they would be interesting.

He eyed Señor Scott with interest. He had struck Cipriano very favourably, had the Patrón's eldest son. He seemed to be a very responsible young man and that was, of course, a good thing for himself and for the estancia, but to take responsibility for whatever had happened to his hermano before they even met seemed excessive.

Señor Scott seemed to see Cipriano for the first time. "Cipriano," he said, nodding a greeting.

"Señor," said Cipriano, gravely.

"You might send a couple of men up to the ridge that Pardee rode in from, Cip," said the Patrón. "From what Johnny told us, you'll find another body up there."

"Si?" queried Cipriano.

"Pardee's second in command, Coley. Johnny said that Coley got in the way when he tried to kill Pardee, just before he rode down here with them behind him. Put Coley on a wagon to be taken into town with the others. I'm not burying any of them here on Lancer."

"I do not think that the priest or the pastor will want them in the cemeteries either, Patrón."

"Maybe not, but that's the job we pay them for. Send them to Pastor Williams in Green River and I'll give whoever takes them a telegram for a US Marshall out of Sacramento. It'll be days before he gets here, but at least now Pardee actually attacked us, the law might be willing to do something about the pack dogs. He can take the rest of Pardee's men off our hands."

"It had better be done today," said Cipriano, with an eye to the spring sunshine brightening the room through the great windows. It was early in the year yet, but the late-morning sun was already strong. It would be warm at noon, very warm, and although the adobe walls were thick in the storeroom where the corpses of Pardee's men had been put (seven of them and Pardee himself), the warmth would affect the bodies and it would be better to get them underground. "The Pastor will not wish to deal with them tomorrow, on the Lord's Day and we cannot keep them here long; evil men keep no better in the heat than do the righteous. I will send Toledano and Mano and tell them to stop by the ridge on the way."

The Patrón nodded, his eyes sharp as they focused on Cipriano, understanding what Cipriano could not yet bring himself to say. "Arturo?" he asked, his gruff voice overlaid with a rough gentleness.

"Si, Patrón."

The Patrón nodded, but said nothing more, resuming his pacing. When he reached Cipriano, he paused and dropped a hand on his shoulder. Cipriano looked up and met the pale blue eyes, and nodded. There was no need for more, not between them. They both knew that Arturo had not died the old-man's death he deserved, but at least at the end he went in quiet and in peace. He would be missed and his memory honoured. It was all he would have asked.

After a moment, the Patrón resumed his pacing, his face set, and Cipriano said, with an apologetic look at Teresa, "I thought we might bury Arturo and the others near Señor O'Brien."

"Yes," said the Patrón. "I would like that. I'd be honoured." He stopped and jabbed again at the floorboards with his cane. "Four good men! Four! They were each worth ten of the scum that killed them. I hope that Pardee's black soul burns in Hell for them!"

"It will," said Cipriano.

"I'd like to be at the funerals," said Señor Scott, "if it's not intruding. I was proud to fight alongside them this morning, Cipriano, and I'd like to pay my last respects."

It was the right thing to do and say, of course. Cipriano understood that Señor Scott had no knowledge of the dead vaqueros. He could not know that Tomas had been born on the estancia; or that Manuel Garcia's wife (dead in childbed these fifteen years and the child with her) had been the daughter of the Patrón's first segundo, before O'Brien came; or that Isidore had come there from the orphanage ten years ago when he was fifteen and had been a miracle with horses; or that Arturo had come to the estancia to work when he was a boy of thirteen, almost sixty years before, and had spent his whole life there. He could not know these things, but he knew how to show respect and loyalty. It was an estimable thing, Cipriano thought, and nodded his approval of right and proper behaviour that would command respect and loyalty in its turn.

It was not enough, of course, if Señor Scott was to stay at Lancer and become a ranchero, but it was a start. It gave them something on which to build.

"The priest is on his way, Señor, and I will make the arrangements with him when he gets here. It may not be today, but whenever we bury them, your presence will be an honour."

"I'd like to be there, too," said Teresa. She had dabbed at her eyes fiercely when she realised Arturo was dead, for she had tended the gardens alongside the old man since she was a little _nina_, and she dabbed at them again at the mention of her father. Well, she was very young. Cipriano wondered what she felt when her father's murderer died almost in front of her. He shook his head; she should have been sent to the doctor's house in Green River for safety and should never have seen anything of this morning at all. It wasn't proper, the license allowed _gringa_ girls.

"We'll all go," the Patrón said, with a glance at the closed kitchen door. "It's only right we give them a place on the land. We owe them so much and some of them were here before me. Arturo was, of course, as you know, Cipriano." To his son he explained, "Cip worked for Don Velásquez before I bought this place. He and Isabella had been married a couple of years or more then, and Eduardo was no more than a baby. He'd be what, Cipriano, about eighteen months?"

"A little less," said Cipriano. "He was a year old just before the Don sold you the estancia. I remember very well the day that you and the Señora came. The first Señora de Lancer, Señor Scott, your mother."

"Just Scott, please," said Señor Scott. He added, shyly, "One day, Cipriano, I'd like to talk to you about those days, if I may."

Cipriano saw the Patrón's hand tighten on his cane and merely smiled non-committedly in response. He had no time to say anything, anyway. Doctor Jenkins appeared in the kitchen doorway, bundling a bloodied white apron up in one hand.

"Sam?" demanded the Patrón before the doctor had taken more than a step into the room. Señor Scott sat up very straight, his level gaze on Jenkins.

"Not too bad, Murdoch. So far, anyway. As I thought, the bullet was lodged against his shoulder blade but didn't break the bone. He was very lucky. There's still a lot of damage and I've had to put in some deep stitches to repair the trapezius muscle—the one in his upper back—but if we can avoid infection it should heal well. He'll be stiff and sore for some weeks, but he should get full use of the arm back, if he's patient and lets it heal properly."

"Oh," said the Patrón, blankly, and he sat down quickly in the nearest chair. He stared at the floor for a second or two, before straightening up and clearing his throat. "That's good," he said. "That's good news, Sam. Thank you."

Cipriano caught the doctor's amused, affectionate look and they shared a moment of understanding. The Patrón would never admit to anything he thought of as weakness, they both knew that. Cipriano wondered if the sons would change that, if they would be the weakness that could be changed to strength.

"It's not all good, Murdoch," warned Jenkins. "He was starting a fever when I got here and it looks like it's settling in. I have to say that it worries me. It worries me a lot. We need to watch him carefully."

"Caused by the other injuries, sir?" asked Señor Scott.

"They certainly didn't help. Most of them are healed, or well on the way, but he's hardly on top form and he's malnourished. It's pulled the boy's strength down and that's given this fever its chance." Jenkins shook his head. "He doesn't have much in reserve to fight it, and that's the truth. We'll just have to hope he can ride it out. Let's get him upstairs and settled."

"I will help," said Cipriano. He smiled at the Patrón. "It will not be the first time I've put him to bed, after all."

The Patrón nodded, his mouth twitching into a reluctant smile. "He's a little bigger and heavier these days, Cip. Do you remember how much he adored Eduardo? He followed him around like a puppy. And how he and Jaime squabbled over their toys?"

"I remember it very well," said Cipriano, sadly, thinking of the bright, happy two-year-old, only a month younger than Jaime. But for his bright blue eyes and slightly paler skin, the Patrón's son and Jaime might have been twins. "But he will not."


	2. Chapter 2

On Sunday, the day following Pardee's raid, Cipriano had hoped to sleep late. He had been late abed by the time everything had been set in better order, Padre Pedro greeted and the virtuous dead anointed and prayed for, and the corpses of Pardee and his men sent to Green River. But he woke before dawn as usual and Bella persuaded him to go with her to Mass, to pray for Arturo's soul and give thanks for their deliverance. And by 'persuade', she handed him his Sunday clothes in a wordless assumption of compliance that Cipriano did not have the cojones to question.

He drove her into Morro Coyo, Eduardo and Jaime riding behind the wagon. The boys still rode on the alert, with rifles ready, despite the fact that a grumbling Pastor Williams and the Green River undertaker had planted Pardee into the only six feet of good Californian earth that the man would ever own.

Well, it was maybe all to the good. The word that Toledano and Mano had brought back from Green River was that Pardee's men had scattered and gone, but they may not have gone far and some might seek revenge or an easy target for robbery. Besides, habits learned in time of danger would be hard to shake.

A truism, thought Cipriano, but doubly, triply, a hundred times true of the sick man back at the hacienda who had lived with such danger not for a few months, but all his life. All the way to Morro Coyo, Cipriano pondered the question of whether Johnny Madrid could ever unlearn those habits and resume being Johnny Lancer.

The parish church of San Miguel was the richest and most ornate building in Morro Coyo, a once purely-Spanish pueblo. Even now, when so much of the San Joaquin had become American, the churches remained a testament to California's proud history. San Miguel brooded at the end of Main Street, casting its elaborately-towered shadow over the stores and saloons, reminding them that ultimately all belonged to God. If, amended Cipriano hurriedly, you were a woman and pious, you would be so reminded. A man welcomed the shade from the hot sun, that was all.

The church was cool and dim, and the air was thick with incense. It's a good smell, Cipriano murmured quietly to Bella as they took their seats under the curious and excited eyes of the entire community, and was rewarded with a slight smile. He brushed a hand over his moustache complacently; a woman was always pleased by such small gestures of respect to the things she thought important and it cost nothing. He would try and find something to say of the sermon, perhaps, to please her.

He glanced around the church to find the entire congregation was staring at them. News of the thrilling events at Lancer had spread like wildfire, of course, and Cipriano was interested to see that even many of the gringos (who were not good Catholics but heathen) were there to stare and point and whisper behind their hands. As Mass progressed, he was amused at their discomfort as they followed the unfamiliar service. He wondered how many would be rubbing liniment on sore knees that night.

Beside him, his Bella fell gracefully to her knees, rose and dropped again. Ai, but she was a magnificent woman, was Isabella Muñoz de Roldán. Many people in the San Joaquin said so (including Isabella Muñoz de Roldán) and almost universally addressed her as Señora Isabella as a mark of deep respect as if she were the wife of a Don, not a humble, hard-working Segundo.

Cipriano watched her, only half an eye on what Padre Pedro was doing at the altar. The seventeen-year-old Señorita Isabella Muñoz Garcia had set the Valley alight, every young man desperate to have the Beauty look on him, to make her smile at him, to take his hand and dance with him. Dios, but she was glory and heaven and temptation, and how Cipriano had burned for her! He had seen her first at a fiesta, dancing, and he hadn't slept for a week afterwards. Every time he'd closed his eyes, he'd seen her bright face and flashing dark eyes, his groin had grown hot and tight with longing and he'd groaned into his pillow until his anxious mother called to ask if he were sick. Well, yes, if only of love. He'd thought he'd die of it.

In her late forties, Bella was still extraordinarily handsome, and if the dark eyes were more sombre now with the weight of knowledge gained with maturity and the enduring sorrow that was the grave of their small daughter in the church's shadow, they were still lovely enough to make Cipriano groan with longing. Many people in the San Joaquin (including Isabella Muñoz de Roldán) said aloud and in Cipriano's hearing, that they wondered how he'd ever managed to persuade the Valley Beauty to marry him. Cipriano knew that there'd been nothing to distinguish him in looks or fortune from twenty or thirty other such young men, each of whom eyed the lovely Isabella and wondered if she could be persuaded to smile on him. He wasn't sure himself why she'd chosen him above the other aspirants for her smiles, and had no answer to give the doubters.

Bella poked him in the ribs to bring his wandering attention back to the order of Mass. He saw the little lift of her mouth, the little quirking smile that was for him alone. Unlike many people in the San Joaquin, Bella only proclaimed her magnificence or wondered at her husband's good fortune to him, never in the presence of others, and she always laughed as if both concepts were very good jokes indeed.

Cipriano didn't think such truths were jokes. He spent the rest of the Mass honouring Arturo, thanking God for their deliverance from Pardee and, most of all, thanking God for his Bella.

At the end of the service, Bella was, as usual, the centre of the women in the congregation. They always gravitated to her, like moths to the bright candle flame. Usually they were seeking her approval whether it be for something as frivolous as the set of a sleeve or something of more moral weight, such as the opinion they ought to have of a new priest. They reminded Cipriano always of suppliants seeking notice and favour.

Today Cipriano noted a certain smug complacency about them and wondered at the change. They were full of gossip and sympathy about her ordeal at Lancer, with much patting of her hands and compassionate cooing. Señora de Baldomero, the wife of the storekeeper, even went so far as to call Bella _her poor dear._

Cipriano understood it then. They thought that tables were turned, a little, and that they were in the ascendancy now, that they were the bestowers of comfort and approval while Bella was in their usual place as a suppliant, and along with this perceived reversal came the desire to condescend and patronise. He strayed a little nearer to the gaggle of women, something he usually avoided, to be certain they didn't press Bella too closely. He needn't have worried.

"I was safe with Señor Roldán and our sons, of course, and Señor Lancer and his sons," said Señora Isabella, raising a delicately-curved eyebrow as if astonished. She drew back fastidiously from the patting hands with her usual cool, reserved dignity until the women's hands fell away, their owners abashed at their temerity. "How could it be otherwise?"

In a moment, they were in their usual place, and Isabella Muñoz de Roldán glanced coolly over them. She smiled graciously at Señora de Baldomero as one who smiles on a dependent, but indigent, relative towards whom only the constraint of family feeling prevents a less considerate reaction.

"Ah, Señora," she said, "but how is your husband, the storekeeper?"

Cipriano nodded his appreciation of his wife's unimpeachable manners and grace and turned his attention to the eager questions that same storekeeper was pouring into one ear, while the big Swedish blacksmith, Johanssen, demanded details in the other. They wanted to know most about the pistolero, of course and was it true that the youngest Lancer son was really Johnny Madrid and Pardee's friend? He answered them briefly, seeing no point in trying to hide the truth, and he answered as he knew the Patrón would want—yes, Johnny Lancer is also Johnny Madrid; no, Señor Johnny and Pardee were not friends; yes, they knew each other, they were both pistoleros; yes, Pardee shot Señor Johnny in the back before Señor Scott killed him; yes, Señor Johnny will stay, to join his father and his hermano in running the estancia—while keeping his own opinions (such as they were) to himself and keeping half his attention on his wife's regal progress to greet Padre Pedro with her usual charm.

Ah, but she was magnificent, was Isabella Muñoz de Roldán!

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.

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Cipriano saw no reason to revise his opinion that Señor Johnny was the kind of man to make things happen around him.

For several days the boy struggled, ravaged by the fever that Doctor Jenkins had feared. Jenkins stayed at the hacienda for two nights, fighting to stave off death, never leaving the boy's bedside. But for a grim-faced appearance at the vaqueros' funerals on Monday morning—the priest unable to bury them with Masses on a Sunday because of a Church law that Cipriano privately thought was lacking in Christian charity and, more importantly, in common sense—Cipriano had seen nothing of the Patrón and his eldest son. They sat with Señor Johnny, forcing medicines and willow bark tea into him and bathing him in cool water to try and break the fever's grip.

The entire estancia waited to hear if the child they'd lost twenty years before when the faithless Señora Lancer stole him, would slip away from them again.

They hadn't expected to see him at all. No-one had known he was coming, not even the Patrón.

The Patrón had had telegrams from the Pinkertons, routed through the doctor to keep the news from Pardee, to say that his sons had been contacted and the offer to come to Lancer made. Cipriano knew that the Patrón had offered each of the sons one thousand dollars. One thousand dollars! He didn't think that any man could refuse such a sum, such an inconceivable fortune. Of course they would come.

The telegram about Señor Scott had come weeks before, followed soon after by one from Scott himself giving his expected date of arrival; again routed through Sam Jenkins. But still, silence about Johnny.

"That's about right, I suppose," the Patrón had said bitterly to Cipriano and Señorita Teresa. "I've had nearly twenty years of silence about Johnny."

Then, just over a week before Señor Scott's expected arrival, the news came at last that Johnny Madrid had been located and contacted.

"Luck," the Patrón had said bitterly, unwilling to give the Pinkertons credit for anything at all. "Sheer damn luck!"

But he was not so bitter as he had been the year before, almost eighteen months ago now. After nineteen years of searching the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency had finally made the connexions between John Luis Lancer (aged two years and seven months), abducted by his mother (Maria Martínez Lancer, neé Maria Martínez Aguilera) on her elopement with a gambler from New Orleans, and a notorious hired gun, famous along the border.

.

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.(extract from a report from the Pinkerton Agency, 1869)

_Page 2_

… _as per our previous reports. However, we have been able to make the connexion set out in point (iv) below, and once that was verified by our agent in Brownsville, the following was established, piecemeal, by agents following up known associates of the man we believe to have fully identified to be John Lancer. I have attached reports supporting our conclusions for each of the aliases set out below, giving the evidence and rationale. In sum we believe we can make full connexions between your son, John Luis Lancer (now aged 21) and _

_(i) John Lancer Martínez (age 11), left at a Cantamar orphanage in February 1859 by a man claiming to be his stepfather. Disciplinary record shows the boy was frequently punished for rule-breaking although his behaviour at the mission school was reported to be acceptable (the only period of formal education discovered so far). The boy absconded the following March. Previous history unknown. Mother's whereabouts unknown, but presumed dead. Identity and whereabouts of purported stepfather unknown; _

_(ii) John Martínez (age 13) who served thirty days for vagrancy in an El Paso jail in 1861 and, at age 14 in late 1862, another sixty days in Nogales, Sonora, for petty theft. He had been living on the streets of Nogales with a gang of similarly feral child beggars (mostly Mexican and mestizo) and had stolen a loaf of bread. At his trial, starvation had not been deemed to be a mitigating factor; _

_(iii) Luis Martínez (age 15) who served briefly in Juarez's forces against the French, possibly in lieu of a further jail term for theft. Wounded twice. His service as a horse wrangler ended within the year after a recorded flogging for insubordination in 1863. The Mexican Army records him as a deserter; _

_(iv) John Lancer (age 19) who signed into a Tucson hotel in June 1867. Business unknown, but see next item. First known use of his legal name. Possibly it was used to avoid recognition on this occasion and again when subject (age 20) signed into a Brownsville hotel in March 1868; and _

_(v) Johnny (or less commonly, John) Madrid (age 21), expensive gun for hire and an active gunfighter from at least the age of seventeen, when he fought his first known gun battle in Nogales, Arizona, in April 1865. Almost certainly hiring out his gun for a couple of years before that: sources suggest he had been living by the gun since he deserted the Mexican Army in October 1863. Reason for Madrid alias unknown. _

_Note that Madrid signed on to a range war near Brownsville over March-April 1868 and killed three men, all deemed fair fights (see item (iv), which clew led to the positive identification). All known gunfights have deemed by the authorities to be fair fights, but like most top guns, Madrid is said to be adept at ensuring his opponents draw first by goading or menacing them into it. Madrid is not formally wanted by the legal or enforcement authorities in any state and is not known to have served any prison sentence since he turned professional gunman. Madrid's history is being pieced together from various sources but it is proving very difficult to find anything other than the outline given here and the list of known gunfights (attached). Also attached are anecdotal accounts of Madrid's character._

_Our agents have not made an attempt to speak to Madrid directly, pending your instructions as to the terms of that contact. Awaiting your further instructions and assuring you of our best attention at all times_

_Yrs respectfully_

_._

_Chas. Wilson, Senior Investigator_

_**January 22 1869**_

_**.**_

_**.  
**_

_Attachments:_

_Full report on John Lancer Martinez, with supplementary report on the San Fernando Mission Orphanage and Mission School, Cantamar, Baja California. (5 pages)_

_Full report on John Martinez, with a notarised copy of court and penitentiary records.(6 pages)_

_Full report on Luis Martinez, with a notarised copy of Mexican Army records. Note, these are incomplete. (2 pages)_

_Reports from our Tucson and Brownlee agents on John Lancer. (2 pages)_

_Reports from agents on Johnny Madrid, with a full list of known gunfights and an assessment of his known career. (56 pages)._

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Cipriano hadn't seen the report until later that year, when he became Segundo at the estancia when O'Brien was murdered. The Patrón had revealed the whole detail of the search, giving Cipriano the same confidence that he had given to O'Brien. Cipriano, casting his mind back, remembered several weeks when the Patrón had been well nigh unbearable, so bad-tempered that even Cipriano had thought seriously that this would be a good time to strike out on his own and buy the little farm in Mexico that he and Bella had always talked about.

When the Patrón handed him the Pinkerton reports and gruffly told him to read them, he understood the bad temper. The Patrón must have been devastated by that report, particularly by item (v), although items (i), (ii) and (iii) had been hard to take as well. Cipriano knew now that it had taken the Patrón several weeks and much soul-searching and heart-burning to make up his mind to instruct the Pinkertons to continue to try to locate and contact his lost son. It became all the more urgent that November, when Day Pardee rode into the San Joaquin. But the Pinkertons, for all their vaunted efficiency, hadn't had much success in contacting the infamous gunfighter.

"How does he make a living if he's so damn hard to get hold of?" the Patrón had demanded on the day his youngest son turned twenty-two, goaded beyond endurance by the delay and possibly by the pain in his back from the bullet Pardee had put in it the month before. "What if I wanted to hire him? Anyone I wanted killed would have died of old age before the Pinkertons did anything useful!"

And even when the Pinkertons did finally make contact someplace over the border in Mexico, they had no information to offer about whether Johnny Madrid had accepted the offer to come to Lancer or when he might arrive. _Offer made, report to follow_, the telegram said—"Along with their damned invoice, I suppose!" the Patrón had snarled, tossing the telegram across the desk for Cipriano to read. "They never fail to send that!"—the message arriving at Sam Jenkins's office the day after a second telegram from Scott Lancer confirming that he had reached San Francisco and would complete the business he had to contact there on schedule, and would therefore travel on the stage from Stockton arriving in Morro Coyo the following Thursday, April 7th.

By comparison to his younger brother, Señor Scott was so very uncomplicated. He had been contacted, he had agreed to come, he made his travel arrangements and politely gave them advance warning of his schedule so that they could meet him after his long overland journey across the entire continent. It was all so straightforward. Scott Garret Lancer was not someone with many names to hide behind and his whereabouts to conceal.

Cipriano and the Patrón had discussed Señor Scott's arrival for hours. In the end, they opted to send Señorita Teresa and two hands to meet him in Morro Coyo, knowing the girl would have more chance than Cipriano of collecting Scott virtually unnoticed by Pardee's men, and infinitely more chance than if Murdoch went. It was a risk, but in the town Pardee wouldn't move against Teresa: that would certainly cause the townspeople, most of whom kept their heads down, to react against him and he seemed to avoid that. Presumably, said the Patrón dryly, he preferred not to fight wars on more than one front or bring the US Marshal down on his head. Pardee kept his gang either inside the cantina or outside of town altogether, and did little to antagonise the townspeople. Lancer was his main target; Teresa should be safe enough.

What they hadn't expected was that Johnny Madrid would be on the same stagecoach having hitched a lift ten miles outside the town, from the farm where he'd left his lame horse. Cipriano wished that he could have seen the brothers' faces when they each realised who the other was. Neither had known of the other's existence, and Cipriano thought that he would have enjoyed the joke.

The first the estancia knew of the younger son's arrival had been when the wagon turned into the hacienda's gate and there he'd been. Señor Scott, resplendent in clothes and a hat the like of which Cipriano had never seen before, sat on the wagon seat with Teresa. Johnny Madrid had been in the back, leaning on his brother's luggage and his own saddle with his legs stretched out along the wagon bed, with his hat tilted over his eyes and shadowing his face. When he saw him, Cipriano's breath had caught in his throat with surprise and something that may have been shocked delight.

The _nino_ was back where he belonged. After almost twenty years, the _nino_ was home.

Then Johnny Madrid had jumped down from the wagon, to stand for a moment, turning to look around the hacienda courtyard, his stance wary and his right hand brushing the grips of the Colt pistol that lay against his right thigh.

He wasn't as tall as Señor Scott, not by two or three inches, and his father would tower over him by a whole head, but then who didn't the Patrón tower over? He wore clothing like the vaqueros' own: calzoneras with silver conchos, an embroidered shirt of a pink that Cipriano himself would hesitate to wear, and a short bolero jacket trimmed with gold braid. So far, so recognisable. He looked right, in a way Señor Scott did not; he looked like he belonged, a true Californio.

He looked right, except for the way that he carried his gun.

Every man in the West went armed. Most men were competent with a gun, but most wore their gun belts high, where the belt sat comfortably yet still allowed a man to reach his pistol in time of trouble. Only a very few were masters, were virtuosos, who made their living through their skills with a pistol, whose lives (and deaths) rode on the speed at which they drew and fired their guns. Such men modified and customised their guns to fit the grip of their gun hand, and shortened the barrel for a faster clearance of the holster. They wore their gun belts low, very tight on the hips, with the holster tied down so that the butt of the gun was perfectly placed to slip into the hand for a fast draw.

Few draws were faster than that of Johnny Madrid. It was said that many men had tried to outdraw him. Most of them, probably all of them, were dead.

The vaqueros who had gathered to greet Señor Scott had stared at the gun in that low-slung belt, knowing what it meant. Cipriano had stared for a moment himself before raising his eyes to meet a cold blue gaze, hard with a simmering anger and resentment. He didn't know why the pistolero was angry, but he had recognised at once that Johnny Madrid was dangerous, and perhaps not only to men who called him out in the streets.

Not for the first time, Cipriano wondered if the Patrón had done the right thing calling the pistolero home.

Because this was no _nino_. This was not the little Juanito who had captured all hearts. The _nino_ was gone forever and Johnny Madrid didn't remember that this was his home. This was a man who had been forged by a life of deprivation such that even Cipriano, who knew how ill a _mestizo_ child would fare alone in the dangerous towns along the border, could barely imagine; a man who, by the time he was fifteen, had turned to the gun to survive.

Who knew how many men Johnny Madrid had gunned down?

This was a dangerous man, a killer, and he was more equivocal in his loyalties and his motives than they could ever have dreamed. None of them had ever really known a pistolero, much less one of the top guns; none of them were prepared for the cynical, dangerous young man who stepped out of the wagon.

The next day, Cipriano had watched him break the palomino stallion with brisk efficiency, but without cruelty. He had not used the spurs that jangled at his heels to madden the horse and make a sport out of it, as many horse-breakers would do to please their audience, but had acted quickly to cause the animal the least distress while still subduing it to his will. He had been aware of the vaqueros watching and cheering, but his focus had been on the horse. _He is used to working with horses, then, and he is very good at it; maybe as good as Tomas,_ said Cipriano to the Patrón, warming to the brilliant smile Señor Johnny had given his hermano when Señor Scott rode the green-broken palomino. They were both good horsemen, Cipriano concluded, filing away the information to add to the picture he was building of the Patrón's sons.

Then came the Bocanegras' messy deaths and Johnny Madrid rode away, not with Señor Scott and the rest of the Lancer vaqueros to trick Pardee out into the open, but into Morro Coyo to drink more tequila with the Bocanegras' murderer. It appeared he had left the estancia again, after spending only one night under his father's roof. It appeared that he had made his choice.

The whole Pardee affair was over at dawn the next day, and Cipriano still did not know if it had been Johnny Madrid or Johnny Lancer who had brought Pardee's men under their guns. Señor Johnny was still equivocal, unknown and unknowable, cynical and dangerous. The fact that he lay in the hacienda with a bullet in his back, fighting off death, made no difference.

Still no-one knew what he had done, why he had done it, what he wanted, or what he would do if he lived.

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"Will they stay?" asked Bella. She knew, as they all did, the hollow place at the heart of the estancia where the Patrón 's sons should be. The estancia needed its heirs as much as Murdoch Lancer needed his sons.

"The Patrón has offered them each a third of the estancia if they will stay. Señor Scott said he will, and he proved himself with that trick he played on Pardee. I don't know about the other. He may have come just for the money. One thousand dollars is enough to tempt any man, even a pistolero who may command the highest prices. Staying to work here as an ordinary man, not living by the gun… well, that's a different matter."

"That's an ungenerous thought, Cipriano."

"Well, he didn't come before," argued Cipriano, "although he's used the Lancer name. He knew who he was. He must have known who his father is and where to find him and yet—"

"And yet we can't know until he chooses to tell us, why he didn't come home earlier," said Bella, reasonably, shrugging her still-pretty shoulders as if the reason the pistolero hadn't come home was not of great importance. "Until we can talk with Juanito, gauge what moves him, how he thinks…"

"He's no longer Juanito," said Cipriano. "Don't make that mistake, Bella. He's a pistolero, one of the greatest of them all. He won't tell us what he thinks. It isn't their way to open themselves to others. That way lies a weakness to be exploited."

Bella smiled, and showed she had understood exactly what Cipriano wondered about and grieved for. Her shrug hadn't meant that Juanito's motives were not important, but that there were other things that mattered just as much. "But he'll show us through what he does, not just what he says or doesn't say. Words aren't everything, Cipriano. From what you've said, he won't be a man for words. He'll show us who he is, and that's more important than who he was and, most certainly, than what he used to do. It will be enough."

Cipriano smiled back and hoped so. But he did not forget the first day when Johnny Madrid tipped back the hat that had shadowed his face and stepped down out of the wagon into the courtyard of the home he could not possibly remember. Cipriano had not been mistaken, he felt, in seeing the anger simmering in those startlingly blue eyes. He feared what the anger meant and what it made Johnny Madrid do. He feared where it came from.

He saw, like a shade, the ghost of the passionate and beautiful Maria Martínez de Lancer. He mistrusted ghosts. They were like trying to catch mist with your fingers. They had a way of refusing to answer questions and evading all responsibility, slipping away to leave the consequences of their actions for the living to endure.

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Despite his words of caution to his wife, Cipriano found that as the days wore on, he stopped thinking of the sick man as Johnny Madrid or even Señor Johnny; but always as Juanito, the little one whom Señora de Lancer had often left in their care to play with Jaime, so that sometimes Bella said it was if she'd birthed twins. Cipriano had mourned the loss of Juanito almost as much as the Patrón had.

He dreaded that he would have to mourn all over again, before he could find out who it was he would be grieving for.

Consequently, it wasn't just the Patrón and the elder son who breathed more easily when Doctor Jenkins pronounced Señor Johnny to be out of danger and on the mend. It would be slow, because the fever had left him weak, and it would take time for him to rebuild his strength. But the boy would live. Now it only remained to determine what he would live for, and how, and who he would show them he had decided to be.

On the third full day after the raid, the day after the fever broke, Cipriano went to collect the Bocanegra boys from the priest in Morro Coyo 'and bring them back to Lancer, where they could be with people they knew and the one or two other children who were returning to the estancia now that the danger was past. Before seeking out Padre Pedro, he slipped into the church to nod his thanks to the good Dios hanging there above the altar where twenty-two years earlier, John Luis Lancer had been christened in a froth of white lace.

He reflected, as he stood in the dim, incense-heavy nave, that it was unlikely that Señor Johnny would make a visit to give thanks on his own behalf. Cipriano did not remember the second Señora Lancer as being particularly devout and she had certainly not remained faithful to the vows that she had made in this very church; he did not think that she would have raised her son to be pious. Besides, pistoleros as a breed were not known for their religious fervour.

Religion was the demesne of women, of course, and a man only went to church at their behest and to keep the peace at home, or when he grew so old that he felt the weight of his mortality more keenly than he felt the rush of air in his lungs. Cipriano felt out of place there on a day that was not Sunday and without Bella chivvying him to Mass. So his visit was swift and furtive, lasting little longer than it took for him to light one candle for the _nino_ who was surely gone forever and one for the unknown and possibly unknowable man the child had become, and to look for a moment into the perfect, downcast face carved into the wood above the altar of He who surely knew what was in the heart of both child and man but would keep His silence. Cipriano seldom thought on such things, but that day he wished he knew the mind of God, at least so far as It pertained to the doubtful presence of Johnny Madrid Lancer in their lives.

He shook his head and lit another candle for Arturo, and went to collect the sad little Bocanegra boys, who were as bereft as once Juanito had surely been bereft.

He left the wooden face of God to keep His secrets.

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When Aggie Conway came, Cipriano was directing some repair work on the horse barn that formed the east wall of the big courtyard at the back of the hacienda.

The estancia was slowly returning to normal. They had nowhere near enough hands, and more than enough work to keep them busy repairing the barns and workshops and keeping watch over the herds close to the hacienda. But soon they would have to hire more men, and many of them. The Spring round-up was almost upon them, and if the Lancer herd was to be gathered and branded, and moved to the railheads to be shipped to feed the hungry Eastern cities, they needed to get up to full strength as soon as they could; and at its height, the estancia needed more than a hundred hands and drovers. Where he would find so many, and men he could trust, concerned Cipriano. It might take months to re-establish the estancia.

Señora Conway was riding alone, as she would not have dared to do if Pardee were still breathing. But already life was returning to normal in the Valley now that the evil dog was dead and safely buried in Green River's Boot Hill without so much as a wooden marker over the cursed earth that covered him. Cipriano could feel the change for himself and found that he breathed more easily. It was as if he had been running a race for a long time, one that had worn down his endurance and his strength and was only just over so that now he could rest a little, this race won and the next not yet on the starting blocks. The relief everyone felt could almost be seen and touched. The towns were easier and freer; here on the estancia men laughed more, chattering as they worked and of an evening he could once again hear guitars and singing coming from the bunkhouse where the bachelors lived. Ai, that Toledano! He sang all the time again, the way he used to, but Cipriano devoutly hoped neither Bella nor Teresa ever managed to make out the words.

When Cipriano lifted the Señora from her horse, she took a moment to settle her full riding skirts and beat the dust from them with her hat while she greeted him and asked after Señora Isabella's health, congratulated him on Eduardo and Jaime both being safe and asked about the wounded vaqueros. She pressed his hand with sympathy when he told her of Arturo and the others.

She was a nice woman, Señora Conway, for a _gringa_. Many of the rancheros around Lancer would think most about the consequences to one of their own or to the white hands, and the Mexicans who fought and died were of lesser account. But the Señora noticed them and was quick to ask about more than just the Lancer son. She was a lady, Bella said, with the recognition of peer for peer.

Before Pardee came to steal the gossip, as well as try and steal the land, there had been much talk in the Valley about the widowed Señora Conway and Murdoch Lancer. She and her husband had come to the Valley fifteen years earlier, and now Henry Conway was six years dead and Murdoch Lancer remained alone after the second Señora de Lancer had eloped with the gambling man from far-away New Orleans, the women of the Valley had married them a dozen times over. The men of the Valley held themselves above such foolish gossip, although they did see how prudent it would be for Murdoch Lancer to add the Conway acres to the Lancer estancia and they discussed that possibility now and again, as men of affairs talk of business matters, and that is soberly and rationally and with an eye to financial advantage.

It was all nonsense, as Cipriano knew. He did not pretend to know Señora Conway's mind on the matter, but he did know that when Maria Martínez de Lancer left, she'd taken most of the Patrón's heart with her; and though a large part of that was bound up in the child, a considerable amount was on her own faithless account. Not even the Conway acres made up for that loss.

Still the Patrón was usually less gruff whenever he saw the Señora and something in him softened. He must have heard the horse arrive, and came out to meet her. "Aggie!" he said. She put on the hat to hang down her back by its stormstrings, and held out both her hands. He hooked his cane over his forearm, and took her hands in his. "I'm glad you've come, Aggie."

She smiled. "The Valley's buzzing with it, Murdoch, and everyone's dying with curiosity but people know better than to come too soon. I thought you'd be better disposed towards visitors when John was on the mend, so I came as soon as I heard he was out of danger. How is he?"

"Better. I've almost lost track of the days. It's what, Wednesday, today? The fever broke on Monday evening, and although he's very weak still, he's improving by the hour." The Patrón smiled suddenly, looking younger and less care-worn. "Wednesday, already! The boys arrived a week ago tomorrow and I can barely believe how quickly the time has passed. Stay for lunch, Aggie. You must meet Scott, and you might get a chance to at least say hello to Johnny, if he's awake. He's still sleeping a lot, of course."

"I'd be delighted to meet them both. You've waited so long, Murdoch, and I very much want to see your sons."

The two of them turned towards the house, and Cipriano, lacking shame and taking the opportunity that offered, fussed over Señora Conway's raw-boned bay horse in order to hear what they were talking about. Surely that was something in the right fore shoe? It ought to be checked before he called a hand to take the horse to the barn. He lifted the hoof to see and took his penknife from his pocket to scrape at the horseshoe industriously.

The Señora paused when they reached the covered loggia at the back of the house. "Murdoch, before we go in you'd better know something of what everyone's saying. There's a lot of talk about Johnny, you know. People are worried. Day Pardee was bad enough, but Johnny's reputation—"

"He's nothing like Day Pardee!"

"He's faster and more dangerous, that's what people are saying. They're frightened. They want to know what Johnny's going to do here."

"He'll work this ranch, with me and Scott, that's what he'll do here."

"And hang up his gun? People are worried about having such a famous gunfighter in the Valley. Oh Murdoch, people say that Johnny hooked up with Day Pardee, that he was seen drinking whiskey with the man in a cantina in Morro Coyo—"

"Tequila," muttered the Patrón.

"What?"

"They were drinking tequila. Aggie, I know that Johnny knew Pardee. They were both gunfighters, after all, even if Pardee was not in Johnny's league. But Pardee had no idea that Johnny is my son. Johnny pretended to go along with the man's plans, but he was working against him all the time."

"Mur—"

"If he hadn't tricked them into chasing him down the hill last Saturday morning, they'd have surrounded us. We may not have been able to drive them back if he hadn't brought them under our guns in a bunch like that. We killed so many of them in that first volley, it broke them."

"I'm sure you're—"

"He took a bullet in the back for us, Aggie, and by God, he almost died for it! I won't have that played down by people eager to gossip about Johnny Madrid!"

"Of course, Murdoch," said Señora Conway, in the soothing tone that Cipriano, the married man, recognised all too well. "Of course you're right—"

I have every faith in him," declared the Patrón. "He was born to be a rancher, to be a Lancer. This is his birthright."

_Oh_, _Patrón_, thought Cipriano, carefully lowering the bay's right hoof and resting his forehead against the rough mane. He closed his eyes as sudden weariness and a sharp grief made him ache like an old man. Aggie Conway had done no more than voice the doubts that all of them had. He wondered what had made the Patrón so vociferous in his son's defence. _Who are you trying to convince?_


	3. Chapter 3

Tamales and Beans

Part Three

Later that day, as the sun was setting, Cipriano was surprised when the Patrón appeared at his door. He had something over his arm, a folded jacket. He looked… not apprehensive, precisely, but he looked as though he were seeking favours. Indeed, it was unusual for the Patrón to come to the married hands' quarters; he had to want something very particular.

Cipriano and Bella were in the main room of their adobe house, the largest in the small cluster of houses that sat in the meadow behind the hacienda, enjoying the last of the sun. She was working her embroidery, stabbing the needle in and out of the cloth with skill and dexterity while they talked. Eduardo had gone to Stockton that day to bring his wife and child home from her father's house where she had been sent for safety, and would not return for some days. Jaime was visiting his sweetheart, on the Crooked R ranch across the Valley and the two sad little Bocanegra boys were sleeping. The house was quiet, and Cipriano was revelling in the peace.

When the Patrón arrived, Cipriano was going through the few things that Arturo had owned. The old man's will left them in Cipriano's care until the grandson, the younger Arturo, was old enough to have them. It was both a sorrow and a great privilege, to have a man's life in his hands like that.

"Patrón!" greeted Cipriano, rising, and putting aside the beautifully tooled and crafted leather knife-sheath that had been one of Arturo's prized possessions. It came from Old Spain, from Córdoba, and had once belonged to a proud Don. He shook hands. "You are welcome."

"Buenos noches," said the Patrón, with a short, stiff bow for Bella. And as she rose, gathering her needlework to leave the men to their talk, he said, hastily, "Please don't go, Señora Isabella. I've come to see you just as much as Cip, here. I need your help."

"Of course, Señor," said Bella, with a half-bow so graceful that it filled Cipriano's soul with delight, even after all these years of possession. "How is Juanito?"

"He's doing very well. He managed to sit up in bed for a few minutes today, when Señora Conway visited, although that wore him out and he slept away the entire afternoon. But it's better than we feared only a few days ago."

"I am glad," said Bella, simply. She went to the big press at the side of the room and returned with the brandy bottle and two glasses; the Patrón had never learned to stomach tequila. "I have never forgotten the little one, Señor. God is very good, to bring Juanito home again at last."

"Well, he doesn't like being called that, for some reason," said the Patrón, swallowing back a sigh.

"No? I will remember, Señor." She offered him the brandy with another graceful half-bow. When she handed Cipriano his glass, he caught the little quirking smile.

Cipriano thought that Señor Johnny's preferences about which form of his name people used would be as naught against the relentless women of the estancia who remembered him. He stroked his moustache to hide his smile with his hand. His Bella wouldn't fear even the great pistolero, he reflected, and he would always be Juanito to her.

"And how can I help? Señorita Teresa told me that she and Maria were managing to care for him." Bella gave the Patrón one of the reserved smiles she kept for people outside the familia, the smile that belonged to Isabella Muñoz de Roldán. "I did not insist on helping, since it's only right that she gets to know her new hermano and she was fired with enthusiasm for taking care of him. There will be time for me to get to know Juanito—Johnny—again when he is well."

The Patrón smiled back. "I hope so, Señora. In the meantime, though, I need your skills in another area." He unfolded the jacket and laid it across his knees, and Cipriano saw that it had been slit up the back and both sleeves. "This is Johnny's. We had to cut it and his shirt off him to get the bleeding stopped, and he doesn't have another. He only seems to have brought one spare shirt with him and it looks like he used that to clean his boots. Teresa's managed to salvage that one."

"The pink one?" asked Cipriano, remembering.

"That's the one. Not a colour I'd choose, but Johnny says it's his favourite shirt. The thing is, he's already talking about getting up and out of bed. Sam Jenkins won't hear of it yet, of course, but it made me realise that we need to get him some new clothes against the time that Sam relents and lets him up." The Patrón chuckled, but Cipriano thought that it was to hide his chagrin about his youngest son's poverty. "He might fit into one of Scott's shirts although I don't think he'll like the ruffles if what he said that first evening is anything to go by, but he'd drown in one of mine."

They all laughed, politely, although something in Cipriano felt how wrong it was that the boy should have only the clothes he travelled in and he could see from the sparkle in Bella's eyes that she thought the same. What had he been doing, to have so little? Johnny Madrid was said to be one of the most expensive guns for hire. He should have had more to show for it.

"Teresa and Maria could make him some shirts, if they weren't spending so much time nursing him, but neither one of them has your touch, Señora Isabella. He dresses vaquero-style, and he seems to like his things decorated."

"I would be happy to make them," said Bella, and the Patrón thanked her as if she were the one conferring a great favour. Cipriano hid a smile; he knew that she had wanted to do something to help and had been chafing at her inactivity.

"I wasn't thinking of you doing that, precisely. The Baldomeros have set up a ready-made workshop at the back of their store, you know, and I thought we could buy half-a-dozen made-up shirts from them and save on that labour. He'll need shirts for best as well as for work. What I would like you to do is embroider them for him, if you will. You do the finest stitching I've ever seen and, as I said, he favours decoration. His mother—" The Patrón broke off abruptly. "We'll get some more calzoneras and some workpants when he can go and get them himself, but he needs another jacket and the shirts now." He hefted the ruined jacket on his knees. "I thought that this would give you some idea of size."

Bella took the jacket from him to hide her sympathy, looking sombrely at the small hole in the blood-stained left back. The jacket had been of the best quality, cut from the finest brown suede with gold wire braiding. It must have been expensive once, but it was beyond repair. Cipriano wondered if Johnny had bought it new sometime and if the money he earned at his profession went on things like this.

"Tell the Baldomeros to put it all on the Lancer account," said the Patrón. "I'm grateful, Señora Isabella. Very grateful." He cleared his throat, and for a horrified moment Cipriano feared he was going to offer to pay Bella, but the Patrón merely said, "I hear that Jaime is courting the eldest Ruis girl. Will they make a match of it, do you think?"

"We hope so," said Cipriano, cautiously. "Now things are more settled, we hope it will be soon. She is a good girl."

"I like Jaime," said the Patrón. "He's a hard worker, and I've been impressed by some of the ingenious things he's come up with like that pump he built to bring water up from the wells in the south pastures. That's kept the cattle watered and the grass greener for weeks longer than previous years and let us keep them close to the hacienda where Pardee found it harder to get at them. I've never forgotten how he and Johnny played together when they were small, either. I'll tell José to get started on building a new house and I would be proud to host the wedding here, and furnish the house for them. If you will permit it, of course."

Cipriano looked at his wife. She was smiling, not one of her company smiles but one of the real ones that she usually reserved for family. She turned this brilliant smile on the Patrón.

"That is very kind of you, Señor Lancer," said Bella, nodding her approval. "Jaime will be delighted."

Cipriano stroked his moustache again, while he pondered the effect of one of Bella's real smiles; the Patrón looked momentarily stunned. It was a generous offer the Patrón made, worth far more than half-a-dozen embroidered shirts, and it spoke of the esteem the Patrón had for him. Cipriano was not immodest, but he knew it was deserved. He worked hard and loyally for the Patrón, whom he respected despite Murdoch Lancer being first, a gringo, and second, not even an Americano (although, truth be told, this last was not a disadvantage in the eyes of a Californio community that still resented the events of 1846) . He took pride in his work and he took pride in Lancer; he had a vested interest in the estancia where he had worked since he was a boy and where he was now segundo, and he took pride in the way the Patrón had invested much trust in him.

"We are honoured, Señor," he said, and smiled. He was a man who was very content with all that life had to offer him.

x

* * *

x

Cipriano's contentment was short-lived. It came to an abrupt end at breakfast the next day, just as the grey dawn quickened into gold.

While most of the Valley considered that Isabella Muñoz de Roldán was a magnificent woman, it has to be admitted that this was not a universally-held belief. And the leader of the dissenters—a small group, but vociferous—was Señora de Baldomero, who thought that the wife of a wealthy storekeeper and businessman was far more deserving of the title than the wife of a mere vaquero, even a vaquero who was the segundo of the biggest estancia in the Valley. Señora de Baldomero had by far the best claim, she felt: her husband had his own business and was not in servitude to a gringo Patrón pretending to fill the shoes of a true Don, they lived in a house in the town, not an adobe dwelling in the country, her husband could be the next mayor if she could only stir his faint ambition to do more than tend his store.

Bella knew that Señora de Baldomero had said all of these things—although never to her face, of course—but ignored it. She never acknowledged Señora de Baldomero's surreptitious rivalry. She always greeted the Señora with reserved courtesy and never failed to enquire about Señor Baldomero, the lanky Master Baldomero and the orphaned niece who lived with them, but she never, but never, spoke to or of Señora de Baldomero and used her full names. So far as Bella was concerned, Señora de Baldomero had no other names; she was merely the adjunct to her husband and to the store.

One has to assume that this incensed Señora de Baldomero and was the cause of many a bitter _Señora Isabella, indeed! I'm surprised she doesn't demand we call her Doña Isabella!_ and a head toss, but if she never herself called her by the honorific, she met Bella ("My dear Señora de Roldán!") with gracious smiles of her own. She built a small coterie of friends—like herself, women from the Sonora region—and tried to set herself up as Bella's rival, pronouncing on everything from the fashion in bonnets to Padre Pedro's last sermon. So far, the storekeeper's wife had had but limited success. Señora Isabella didn't so much as acknowledge the competition and was still secure upon her throne.

So it was with considerable misgiving that Cipriano heard the wife of his bosom announce that the visit that morning to the Baldomeros to order Señor Johnny's shirts was most opportune.

"In what way?" inquired Cipriano.

Bella smiled. "All will become clear. You will accompany me of course, Cipriano, and then you will find out."

He protested, but Bella was not to be moved. At eight, therefore, after relaying to the hands the Patrón's orders for the day, he hitched up one of the estancia's smaller wagons and handed Bella up into it. The Patrón hadn't objected to his going, so long as he took the opportunity to get out the word that Lancer was hiring again.

Cipriano was disappointed in him. He had relied upon the Patrón to save him.

x

* * *

x

Señora de Baldomero was most pleased to be gracious when Señor and Señora Roldán came into the store. She called the clerk over to relay to him the orders that Señora de Roldán gave, signalling with a lack of subtlety that would later be deplored to an appreciative Cipriano, that she was above running about the store to serve anyone, even—perhaps, especially—Señora Isabella.

Bella appeared to be unaware of these manoeuvrings. She greeted the storekeeper's wife with her usual calm reserve. "I have come for some things for Señor Lancer. He heard of your husband's new venture in providing ready-made clothing." She gestured to the back of the shop, where presumably a gaggle of poor peons laboured over their sewing. "He thought it a very enterprising way of doing business."

Cipriano had occasion to stroke his moustache and smile behind his hand. Señora de Baldomero looked startled. so obviously not knowing how to take such kindly interest. He suspected that she was torn between pride in her husband's business acumen and her usual resentment of Señora Isabella.

"Señor Baldomero realised that there were opportunities there," agreed the Señora, after a moment. She nodded towards the range of fabric stacked against one wall of the store. "There are many men in the Valley who don't have women to sew for them. We make clothes both for the gringos, which are very plain, and for the vaqueros. We sell the cloth for shirts, so, we said, why not provide this extra service, too? They have no other recourse, poor things."

"Very true," murmured Bella, and not in the least as if she felt, as she undoubtedly did, that the Baldomeros were prompted by less altruistic reasons than providing a sizeable section of the community with a much-needed service. There would be a good profit to be made, that was certain.

"I've told Señor Baldomero that we shouldn't limit ourselves to calling our business a simple store any longer. We're an Emporium now, the equal of anything in Sacramento or San Francisco!" said Señora de Baldomero, proudly.

Bella met that sally with a smile of such blandness that Cipriano was impressed.

"We even have a machine to do the sewing," said the Señora.

"Indeed?" Bella's tone conveyed nothing but courteous disinterest, and Cipriano's heart swelled with love and pride. She had heard of such machines from Jaime, whose mind was always filled with new mechanical things, and had reacted with wonder and astonishment; but she would never let Señora de Baldomero realise that she was impressed.

"It cost more than one hundred dollars," persisted Señora de Baldomero.

Bella took her tape measure from the silk reticule on her wrist. "Indeed," she said again. "Now, Señora, I need a bolero jacket, the finest you have."

"For Señor Lancer?"

Señora Isabella raised her eyes in calm surprise and Cipriano had to choke back a laugh at the thought of the Patrón's giant frame in bolero and calzoneras. "I'm buying everything today on Señor Lancer's behalf," she said. "But not for him to wear, certainly."

Señora de Baldomero looked vexed and sent the clerk to bring a selection of jackets for Bella to inspect, her tone sharp with displeasure. Cipriano watched him go, seeing for the first time the racks of clothing standing to one side of the shop, near the shelves carrying the bolts of calicos and denims, poplin and lawn that themselves took up one entire wall of this… what was it? This Emporium. He stroked his moustache thoughtfully. There were many men working on the estancias who did not have anyone to do their sewing. At Lancer, the Patrón paid some of the wives to do the sewing and mending for the bachelors in the bunkhouse, which gave the married hands extra income and was welcomed by all, but not all of the rancheros in the region followed this custom and it was harder for the men to find someone to do their sewing for them. This new venture of the Baldomeros was a prudent investment and was likely to turn them a steady profit.

Bella chose two boleros of the right size and rejected the others. She regarded the two steadily where they lay on the counter: one very like the original, only without any braid, and one of fine black cloth. "These are both of very good quality, Señora," she said, at last, having turned them over several times and inspected every seam and dart at least twice, carrying each over to the window for better light. "Your workmen are very skilled."

"The quality of the cloth we have here is also a reason these are so good," said the Señora, but without her usual snap. Bella's unexpected compliment had caught her off-guard. "Which will you take, Señora?"

"Both," said Bella, decisively. "He'll need the lighter one for summer. But they're very plain."

"That allows our patrons to choose their own decoration," explained Señora de Baldomero, and Cipriano sighed to himself as the two women launched into a passionate discussion about the many sorts of braid that the store clerk was throwing over the counter in an artful confusion meant to display them to the best advantage. He was more than a little bored, if truth be told, but knew better than to desert his post. He gave his opinion on the braid when appealed to, and was unsurprised (and unoffended) when the women united in rejecting it with scorn.

After a short digression into undergarments—"Señor Lancer didn't mention them but we'd better get at least two sets and socks too. Men never think of everything," said Bella—they had progressed to the shirts. Four everyday shirts lay chosen and folded on the counter, three of stout plain calico for Bella to embellish (a dark green and a wine red, both with fancy bone toggles, and dark blue with small silver buttons; and a pink one lay tantalisingly to one side, still under consideration to meet Juanito's known preferences), and one of a blue flowered fabric that Cipriano would rather have liked for himself. Beside them Bella laid two shirts made of the finest white linen buttoned with mother-of-pearl, with deep cuffs and neat collars; both were perfectly plain and awaiting her clever needle.

"For church," Bella said, with a confident assurance that Cipriano felt was thoroughly unfounded.

For a moment all three of them regarded the pile. Cipriano tugged at his moustache. The Patrón was a careful man; to spend so much at once on his youngest son signalled something of what was in the man's heart and what he would never say. Cipriano hoped the young one was adept at reading the signals.

"Excellent!" said Bella. "Señor Lancer will be pleased."

Cipriano was, suddenly, doubtful that Señor Johnny would be as pleased. He would not like to be so indebted, himself. Gratitude, thought Cipriano, was as corrosive as acid, especially if one is unsure of the giver; and he suspected that Señor Johnny was as unsure of the Patrón as the Patrón was of his youngest son. He debated how he might hint as much to the Patrón without giving offence.

Bella glanced up quickly when a girl's voice was heard. Cipriano looked up to see what had caught her attention and caught a brief glimpse of a slender figure with a great deal of black hair whisking itself through to a room at the back of the shop.

Bella paused in her discussion of embroidery silks, a veritable rainbow of which were now spread over the counter for her to match against the shirts. She smiled at Señora de Baldomero. "Was that Maria-Cruz?"

The Señora nodded, fingering a bright, venomously-green silk thread she was trying to persuade Bella would be perfect for embroidering one of the white shirts. Cipriano suspected that that the Señora was desperate to get it off her shelves: the colour would have a hard time being perfect for anything at all and would make even Juanito's tanned complexion look sickly. Bella wouldn't buy it, of that Cipriano was certain, despite her most unaccountable and conciliatory affability towards Señora de Baldomero.

Her manner was confusing the Señora, too, he noticed.

"I was saying to Señor Roldán only the other day what a fine young lady Maria-Cruz is turning out to be, wasn't I, Cipriano?"

"Mmnn," mumbled Cipriano, wondering who Maria-Cruz was and if his wife had ever mentioned her in his hearing. He rather thought not, but was unwilling to be positive.

"Of course, I said, that's only to be expected. She's a very pretty girl, of course, but to make a fine match, to make the very best match, a girl needs to have so much more. There needs to be something about her air, her way of speaking, the way she carries herself that lifts her above her peers and stamps her with the mark of a lady. Isn't that right, Señor Roldán?"

"Mmnn," mumbled Cipriano again, highly amused that his Bella was repeating what so many said of her, and with such an air of innocence. Señora de Baldomero smelled an insult, and was drawing herself up and bridling.

"And dear Maria-Cruz will have all of that, I said; didn't I? You'll remember that I told you that she has her estimable aunt, Señora Lucia Diaz de Baldomero to look to for her pattern. Such a pretty, well-mannered girl you've raised there, Señora." Bella nodded in a decisive manner. "She'll marry very well, no doubt. You're to be congratulated."

Señora de Baldomero looked astonished. Cipriano would have wagered his month's salary on her believing that Bella did not even know her full name. The offended bridling had become pleasure and satisfaction instead, at this unprecedented gesture of respect between equals. "You're very kind," she murmured.

"If only Jaime weren't already betrothed!" said Bella, and then casually, before the startled Señora could do more than open her mouth and bleat a little, she went on, "This blue silk is excellent. I'll take two skeins of it and three each of the gold and silver threads."

The Señora, bemused, put the skeins with the others Bella had already chosen; a dark green and a coppery brown. Cipriano noted that the virulent green was not among them.

"Yes," continued Bella, "she should certainly look to the highest in the Valley. A girl of her accomplishments and charm shouldn't waste herself."

Cipriano winced a little, internally, and lost the conversation for a moment or two. When he returned to it, his wife and the Señora seemed to be in earnest discussion about a bolt of fine, embroidered lawn that the Señora was displaying. Bella was most complimentary about it and the Señora's complacency grew. She mentioned the green silk thread again.

Bella took the skein of silk and looked at it critically, holding it up against the light. "That lawn will make a pretty dress for Maria-Cruz to wear at the fiesta that I'm sure Señor Lancer will hold to celebrate our victory. Such a dress would draw the eye of every young caballero there." She turned to smile at the Señora. "You know, of course, that Señor Lancer's sons have returned to the estancia?"

"Oh yes, yes," said Señora de Baldomero, eagerly. "Ah, but Señor Scott is a brave young man, and so handsome and refined, I'm told! I'm sure the whole Valley is grateful for him ridding us of that dreadful Pardee! I was sorry that the day he came in here those perros of Pardee's caused so much trouble. I wasn't here that day, but Señor Baldomero told me all about it. The poor young man, to be so set upon! And yet he was so very brave and stood up to them when so many wouldn't—"

"I'm buying these things for Señor Johnny," said Bella. "He's recovering from the dreadful injury he got at Pardee's hands as he helped his hermano and his papa defeat that wicked bandito." Her fingers smoothed one of the white linen shirts. "He'll wear this at the fiesta, I think."

Cipriano felt that was considerably more likely than Señor Johnny wearing it to church, but didn't feel called upon to say so.

"Oh," said Señora de Baldomero. She leaned forward and said, in a confidential tone, "He's a pistolero, is he not? I've heard such things—"

"He is Señor Lancer's son," said Señora Isabella grandly, raising an eyebrow.

"Ah." Señora de Baldomero said. "Señora, see how the green contrasts so beautifully with the linen. The linen is of the finest quality, woven in Europe and imported at vast expense, but nothing but the best will content Señor Baldomero. He won't stock inferior goods at this Emporium. You could create an amazing effect with this silk." And as Bella stared blandly at the skein, she said, "A fiesta, Señora? That will be very enjoyable. I remember those we went to as girls! We never had to sit out a dance, did we, my dear Señora de Roldán? It will be same for Maria-Cruz, I'm sure. There will be so many young men there for a girl to choose from, and all of the highest respectability and with good prospects."

"But, of course!" said Bella. Then, very briskly, "I'll take those two red silks and the black, six of each, and that turquoise and the pale blue and this ecru, as well as those others; but not the pink shirt. Would you parcel these things up, Señora and present the bill? Señor Roldán has business to transact for the estancia and we must be going."

Señora de Baldomero's mouth opened once or twice at the abrupt change of tack, but no sound emerged. She looked around for the clerk, who was nowhere in sight. Cipriano had seen Señor Baldomero summon him into the back of the store, but his wife and the Señora had been talking about lace as if they were contemplating their souls' salvation, and he hadn't liked to interrupt. Although he did rather like the look on the Señora's face when she realised she would have to condescend to wrap Bella's purchases for her.

"And the green thread?" she asked, chagrined.

"I think not," said Isabella Muñoz de Roldán, putting down the poisonous green silks whose virtues and beauty the Señora had extolled at great length. "It is, perhaps, a little too… too creative an effect on these fine linens."

x

* * *

x

Cipriano took Bella to the café to recover from her exertions, intending to leave her there for an hour with her friend and cousin-by-marriage, the owner Consuela de Garcia, while he went to Jem Stone's printing press and then visited all the cantinas, stores and saloons and left notices telling all men and drifters looking for work that Lancer was holding a hiring day the following week. After elaborate greetings from Consuela, he seated his wife at a table and had a coffee with her first, curious to know what she thought she had been doing, treating the Baldomero woman with such affability.

"I've never known you long for lace before, querida," he said, making it a question.

"Bait," she said, with that little quirk of a smile that was his alone. She patted the bulky parcel with satisfaction.

Cipriano considered that statement for some moments while he worked his way through a sweet pastry. It explained nothing, he complained when he was finished and wiping cinnamon sugar from the ends of his moustache.

She smiled. "I was thinking, Cipriano, that Juanito is the same age as our Jaime."

Cipriano nodded slowly, taking in this incontrovertible statement with some trepidation. He knew that tone of voice.

"If, as I think we all are agreed, it's imperative that Juanito becomes settled here and has something to tie him to Lancer, that he stays on the estancia to take up his birthright and gives up Madrid, then perhaps it won't be a bad thing."

Cipriano was sure that it would be a bad thing to ask, but felt compelled to anyway. "What won't?"

"Well, he is the same age as Jaime, and Jaime is getting married soon. I've been thinking about that."

Cipriano took a fortifying gulp of coffee. "You've been thinking about our son's wedding?" he asked, guilelessly.

Bella's smile was her most indulgent. "I had considered her for Jaime, but he was already fixed on Magdalena Ruis, and Lena's just as good a match and comes without an aunt the likes of… well." She paused and shrugged. "I'll think of it a little more first," she decided

"What?" asked Cipriano. "Who?"

"Maria-Cruz Baldomero," said his wife, serenely, "has a substantial dowry."

Mierda, but breathing coffee was a painful way to die. "For Johnny?" he gasped, when he got his breath back.

"What did you think we were talking about back there?" she asked, amused. "Of course, for Juanito. Señora de Baldomero, though, won't permit it."

Cipriano reviewed the conversation which had seemed to him to mainly consist of the merits of lace and braid. Obviously he had allowed his mind to wander at the most salient points and indeed he had spent a great deal of time wondering if he could ever buy his Bella a sewing machine. "Ah, she doesn't think he's respectable enough," he realised.

"It's of no concern to her," sniffed Bella. "She won't be the one marrying him."

Breathing coffee twice in as many minutes was a painful way to spend the time, Cipriano noted. Bella laughed and apologised as she pounded him on the back.

"Don't do that, Bella," implored Cipriano. "I'm drowning in coffee. The Señora is such a good businesswoman, that I wouldn't have thought that respectability would weigh against a partnership in the biggest estancia in the Valley."

"I should say that she won't permit it at this time. You'll recall that I said nothing of the partnership." Bella shrugged her pretty shoulders. "This is just speculation, Cipriano, nothing more; just thinking aloud about what might be possible sometime in the future. Don't agitate yourself. Maria-Cruz may not be the right wife for Juanito, in any event. I daresay it won't come to anything and he may have ideas of his own."

Cipriano stared into his coffee cup and wished, devoutly, that it had been tequila. "I daresay it won't," he said, morosely. "And I'm sure he will."

Bella sipped at her coffee. "All I'm doing is planting the seed of the idea in her mind and then, when she finds out about the partnership, to let her realise the chance she's missed to catch an important rancher for her niece. Maybe she'll be a little more eager then and we shall see how things work out."

Cipriano thought that it would be more to the point to plant the idea in Señor Johnny's mind, or the Patrón 's, although he didn't intend to be the man to do it. He also thought that it was unlikely, somehow, that marriage would be something either was thinking about. They both had more immediate questions on their minds. On the Patrón's side he thought these were things like _Can I trust you?;_ and _Why did you not come home? In all these years that you knew who you were, that you had to know where your home was, why did you not come?; _and_ Why did you turn to your gun for a living? What drove you to that?;_ and _Why are you so angry and filled with resentment?; _and_ What happened to your mother?; _and_ Will you run away from here, from me, the way she did?_

He wondered what questions were filling Johnny's mind.


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

"Jem Stone still had the plates from our last hiring day, Patrón, so all we had to do was change the date. It took only an hour to print the notices. Here are the receipts for both that and the things that my wife bought at the Baldomeros' Emporium."

"Emporium?" said the Patrón, lifting an eyebrow.

"Si," said Cipriano, blandly. "It is now the equal of anything in San Francisco. Señora de Baldomero says so."

The Patrón's mouth twitched and he nodded for Cipriano to continue.

"So. We will hold the hiring at the hotel in Green River, next Tuesday. I have sent Miguel to Green River and Spanish Wells with more notices for the saloons and cantinas there."

"He's seeing that girl in the Green River cantina," said the Patrón, putting the receipts inside the ledger on his desk. "We won't see him back here until tomorrow and he'll be hung-over."

"Si," agreed Cipriano, serenely. He thought that the hands deserved some reward for both their faithfulness and the danger they had faced for the estancia and had chosen Miguel for this task for this very reason. The Patrón, if his slight snort was anything to go by, understood that very well and did not object. "There are some who left us, who would not stand with us but who may want to return when they see the danger is over. What shall I do about those?"

The Patrón's mouth turned down. "What do you think?" he challenged, and Cipriano knew that he wanted the opinion of his Segundo, not just the opinion of Cipriano Roldán.

"They do not have a proper feeling for the estancia or a proper sense of duty," he said, as far as he would go in expressing his distaste for their cowardice. "Some, though, were good hands and we need many men if we're to get through the Spring round-up. Time grows short."

"Yes. Well, I think you're right. We'll consider each on their merits and according to how good a workman he was. Beggars can't afford to be choosers."

Cipriano shrugged. "We do not need to keep them past the summer. We will keep only the best over winter." After a moment, he said, "Will you attend the hiring with me, Patrón?" It would be his first as Segundo, although he'd helped O'Brien in the past.

"I thought that Scott might go with you, to start learning the business. He intends to ride with you tomorrow and start work, you know, now Johnny's so much better." The Patrón chuckled. "Truth be told, Johnny's the devil of an invalid. I think Scott will be relieved to get away for a few hours. I don't suppose that riding herd on cows is any more difficult than riding herd on Johnny!"

"And he is doing both for the first time," murmured Cipriano. He frowned, considering. "It will be hard for him. It will be very different from anything he has known. He is not used to labouring with his hands."

"No."

"What did he do in Boston, Patrón?" asked Cipriano. "Have you discovered more than the Pinkertons reported?"

The Patrón hesitated and his mouth tightened into a hard line of disappointment. "No. And you know that the reports said he wasn't doing anything much. He was wasting his time away." He stopped abruptly, as if he hadn't intended to say anything so condemnatory and added, as if in exoneration: "The war unsettled many young men, affected them badly."

The word Libby trembled between them, unsaid.

"True enough." Cipriano considered everything he had learned of the elder son over the last week. "Well," he said, thoughtfully, "We know he can ride well, but he is not used to a western saddle and he will certainly not be used to spending the day on a horse. He can ride a cavalry horse, but working a cow pony takes skills he does not yet have. His hands are soft, like a Don's, and it will take time for them to harden so he can handle a rope with ease. He does not know cattle and how to handle them." He smiled at the Patrón, who was looking a little jaded at the recital of his son's lack of experience. "But we know, too, that he is resourceful and determined and that he does not fear to try things that are new to him, nor does he ignore advice. It may be that in Boston neither the resource nor the determination were demanded of him. We will break him into the work gently and gradually, and explain to him what we are doing, so he learns. He will work with me. All will be well."

"I hope so," said the Patrón, uneasily, and Cipriano knew that he feared this unaccustomed and hard life would drive Señor Scott away. Cipriano did not think the young man would give up so easily.

"We will have to break in Señor Johnny, too, when he is able to work," said Cipriano.

"Johnny's used to our sort of life."

Cipriano thought that the Patrón was being unusually optimistic. He couldn't see much correspondence between a life spent in towns and saloons waiting for jobs requiring gunplay, and the unremitting hard labour that running an estancia entailed. It was true that Johnny wouldn't find a day on horseback to be a trial and he could handle a rope, and he certainly knew horses, but Cipriano wondered about the rest. In his old life he would have just left town and drifted on whenever he wanted, a freedom that most men didn't have. There was a relentlessness about the work of an estancia, unlike anything the young one would have encountered and Cipriano thought that Señor Johnny would chafe at the restrictions and demands of a more regular life.

He wondered why the Patrón didn't see that Johnny would need breaking into that regularity as gently as they planned breaking in Señor Scott into manual labour. He remembered the conversation the Patrón had had with Señora Conway: it wasn't that the Patrón couldn't see it, he thought, but that he wouldn't; he didn't dare admit any doubts about Johnny leaving behind his former life. Cipriano swallowed a sigh. Having the sons come home was a beginning, not a happy ending, not like the tales for children where everyone lives happily for the rest of their lives. And it was a beginning that would be thick with uncertainty as the members of this strange new family got to know each other—and perhaps, got to know themselves. It wasn't clear to him that the Patrón was willing to accept any of that, just yet.

"Si?" was all he said about it, before giving the conversation a slight twist. "I wondered if I could visit with Señor Johnny? I thought he would like news of his horse."

"He would like that, thank you, Cip. That horse was almost the first thing he asked about when he was sensible enough to talk. He seems to have taken quite a shine to it and he was more worried about whether it had taken any harm in that wild ride of his than he was over his own hurts. I told him you were looking after it, but he'll be easier if he hears it from you direct."

"Mmnn," said Cipriano, wondering if that were flattery for him, or a deeply reluctant acknowledgment of the son's doubt that he could trust his father's word. "How is he, Patrón?"

"Much better. Sam Jenkins is surprised at his progress since the fever broke, but it's getting harder to keep him quiet and entertained. He's still tires very easily but when he's awake, he's restless. He's able to sit up a little more now, but gets tired too quickly for chess or checkers. I took some books up there yesterday, but he hasn't trie… they're probably just too heavy and awkward to hold with only one good hand. Scott's been reading aloud to him instead and they'd both maybe welcome a new visitor."

Cipriano looked around the great room and the shelves of books that had been the Patrón's dearest companions for many years. These gringos! Always they had to think of the difficulties and challenges. "I find it hard to read in English," he remarked. "I can do it, but it doesn't come as easily to me as my own tongue. It takes me longer and needs more effort. It tires me."

The Patrón stared at him for a moment, before his face relaxed into a smile the like of which Cipriano hadn't seen in a long time. It was months since the Patrón had looked so free of stress and anxiety, not since O'Brien's murder, and something of the old Patrón was emerging from behind the gruff mask he had been wearing.

"You know me too well, Cipriano. Why didn't I think of that?"

Cipriano declined to offer an opinion. Instead he asked a question of his own. "Why didn't you ask him?"

"To tell the truth, he's so damn touchy that I was afraid to," admitted the Patrón, his tone rueful. "It's hard to talk to him about things that really matter. He doesn't say much about himself, and the few times I've tried talking to him he either doesn't answer or... or things don't go well. I can't see me asking him if he can read and write. He's proud, Cip."

"But of course. He is Mexican." Cipriano grinned. "Well, then you will know how to handle his pride when it comes to the things my wife bought today," he said, allowing himself the luxury of a hint.

The Patrón looked at him sharply. He opened his ledger again and picked out the receipt. "Yes," he said, slowly. "I'll handle it, thank you, Cip."

Cipriano nodded and said no more on the subject. "Do you have any Spanish books?"

"Yes." The Patrón gestured to the bookshelves. "Over by the window. They were… they were hers. His mother's."

Cipriano risked another question. "Does he speak of her?"

The Patrón turned away to stare out through the big window behind his desk, at the land he loved so much. "No," he said, at last. "Not to me. I don't know what happened to her, but I suppose she must have died when he was eleven, when he was sent to that orphanage. That's what the Pinkertons assumed, anyway, and I told them not to look for her, to concentrate on finding Johnny, He said… he said some things while he was feverish that I don't think he would have said if he'd been well. I think that she told him that I didn't want him, Cip. And later, Teresa told me something he said to her and Scott last week. He obviously believed that I threw them out and told her never to come back. Maria must have told him that. I can't believe she told him that!"

Well, that answered one of the Patrón's questions, anyway, if not all of them. It explained why Señor Johnny had never come back to a place that he thought he'd been thrown out of once, and it went some way to explaining the simmering anger in the pistolero's eyes when he arrived. How must it have felt believing that your father didn't want you, didn't think you were good enough to be at Lancer, didn't think you were good enough to be his son, and the only thing that changed was that your father was now desperate enough to need the gun you had turned to, to survive his neglect? That's what Johnny Madrid must have thought, and how he must have hated Murdoch Lancer! Cipriano wondered what Johnny Lancer thought and what he felt, and who he hated.

"That's a hard thing for him to believe," he said. "You must talk to him, Patrón."

"I told you, that doesn't go well. I don't know how to start. "

"You must," insisted Cipriano. "He's very angry."

"Yes," said the Patrón, heavily. "I know. It is a hard thing. And he is very angry."

x

x

_"The man scanned the saloon quickly, his cold sapphire orbs assessing every person in it with a piercing intensity, looking for danger. After a moment, he pushed open the swinging doors and stood just inside, exuding challenge and menace, his right hand resting on the burnished grips of the Colt at his side. As he intended, every eye went to him. The tinkering, tinny notes of the piano faded into harsh, jarring chords as the player froze and stared, and the room was suddenly silenced as if the voice of every man in it were ripped from his throat—"_

Señor Johnny made a gagging sound and was ruthlessly shushed. As Cipriano and the Patrón entered quietly, he rolled his eyes at them and gestured to Señor Scott, who read on relentlessly:

_"One of the saloon girls gasped and raised her hands to her red-painted mouth. Another girl, giving the stranger a curious stare from eyes near as bright a blue as his own, caught her arm and drew her away to the corner of the bar where she and her companions, dressed in tawdry finery, stood out of the line of fire until the stranger declared as friend or foe._

_"The stranger standing just inside the saloon doors was a young man, younger than many of the men in the saloon, and darkly handsome. He favoured Mexican clothing; something that was common along the border, but he was no full-blood Creole, not with those indigo eyes. He was a flashy dresser. His shirt was bright with embroidery done by a beautiful lady from Saltilla named Dolores, who had fallen in love with a pair of cobalt eyes that were never cold when they looked at her; his pants, buttoned down each side with tarnished silver buttons big as dollar coins, clung to muscular legs; his gun belt was notched, each of the many notches marking the death of a man slain by a bullet from the gunhawk's smoking Colt; and when he walked, silver spurs jingle-jangled their discordant music at the high heels of his tooled leather boots._

_"He stood with his right hand resting on the butt of the Colt on his thigh, his fingers flexing as he assessed the danger. He pushed back his black Stetson to hang by its storm-strings and stared at the men in the saloon with his azure eyes. None of them dared meet that cold, cerulean gaze and their own eyes dropped, looking at anything in the room but the stranger, who seemed to be silently daring them to speak or move. His lip twisted into a faint sneer._

_"His brilliant ultramarine gaze swept around the room again and paused, for the briefest moment, on the saloon girls. Most of them wouldn't return his glance, but for one, the girl who had drawn the other to one side to safety. Nettie, she was called. She was a pretty piece and a slender one, with long legs in thin black silk stockings revealed by short satin skirts that barely reached her knees. A portion of her golden hair had escaped the confinement of the feathered combs that had held it piled high on her head, to tumble in rich profusion over bare white shoulders; and in its low-cut, red satin bodice trimmed with black lace, her bosom heaved with quickened, excited breathing when the stranger's eyes met hers. Her face showed already signs of dissipation and sin, though she could have been barely seventeen, but Nettie was still a very pretty girl, the prettiest in the Silver Dollar. She and the stranger exchanged glances, and an unspoken promise leapt from passionate eye to passionate eye before his chilled again and resumed their cold assessment of the rest of the room, and hers sparkled in demure acceptance. Nettie dropped her hands to smooth the red satin over her hips and smiled, but he didn't look at her again. His fierce, concentrated gaze was on the gamblers and drinkers watching him in strained silence._

_"Slowly, knowing that he was the master here, he walked up to the bar, his spurs jangling, and leaned gracefully against it, every man's eye surreptitiously following him. His dark, handsome face was again expressionless. He turned away from them. 'Whiskey,' he said to the quivering bartender. He downed the whiskey in one. 'I'm looking for Black Jake Denny,' he said. 'Tell him I'm here.' The bartender had to try two or three times to find his voice, and he was hoarse with fear. 'Who shall I say's askin', stranger?'_

_"The stranger smiled, his teeth white against his tanned skin. It was a cold smile, a dangerous one, and the bartender flinched away. 'The name's Madrid,' he said, his voice a soft drawl, but every man heard it and trembled. 'Johnny Madrid.' _"

Señor Scott paused. "End of chapter one."

"Boston, that's a load of shit! You can't tell me someone got paid for writing that stuff!"

"Murdoch said you had to watch your language," said Señor Scott.

"And I meant it," said the Patrón, taking the book from Scott's hands. He flipped it closed to read the title and grimaced. "I see."

"You said I had to watch it around Teresa," said Señor Johnny. "I don't think Cipriano's going to faint away because I said shi… bad things."

"Believe me, John, you need the practice." The Patrón returned the book, took the big chair in the window and eased out his stiff leg with a soft sigh.

Señor Scott grinned and greeted Cipriano in careful Spanish, before reverting gratefully back to his own language. "Buenas tardes, Cipriano. Have you come to help entertain my little brother? We're about to embark on some literary criticism, I think."

"Buenas tardes." Cipriano looked Señor Johnny over carefully.

He was half-lying, half-sitting, propped up on half a dozen soft pillows to support his back and shoulder. Cipriano could just see the edge of the heavy bandage on his left shoulder over the neck of the too-big nightshirt he was wearing. Cipriano wondered if it was one of the Patrón's and realised that even his Bella had feet of clay and couldn't think of everything; a nightshirt had to be the one thing she hadn't bought from the Baldomeros that day. Señor Johnny was still pale, his face looked thin and it was obvious that he had been ill, but Cipriano was reassured that he was indeed on the mend. His eyes were bright, but not with fever, and they were clear, without the anger that had simmered there when he arrived. While that may only be abeyance, if the Patrón had not talked with him yet, it was still a great advance. What was not an advance was the gun belt hanging over the bedpost within reach of Johnny's right hand. The sight of that saddened Cipriano.

"¿Cómo está usted, Señor Johnny?"

"Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y usted? And just Johnny, por favor."

"Muy bien, Johnny, muy bien." Cipriano remembered that the older son had also asked him to drop the 'Señor', and he resolved to try.

Scott jumped up from his chair to sit on the bed, his back against one of the elaborately carved bedposts. Johnny shifted slightly to make room for him, grimacing with the effort. "Lie still, Johnny, there's enough room. Have my chair, Cip."

"Gracias, Scott. What were you reading?"

"Some load of old—"

"A dime novel, called 'Johnny Madrid, the Border Hawk: Trouble along the Cimmarron'," interrupted Scott, before either he or the Patrón had again to remind his hermano about his language. "I bought it on the way here to give me an idea of what to expect in the West. Of course, I had no idea it was about my own little brother."

"He's punishin' me," said Johnny morosely. "I'm trapped here, helpless in my bed, and I can't get away and he's punishin' me."

"What for?" asked Cipriano.

"I dunno. But I'm really very sorry an' I won't do it again."

Scott laughed. "I hope not. I don't want to have to keep carrying your sorry carcass around California, oh Border Hawk. You're heavier than you look."

"Or maybe I'll just shoot him," said Johnny, thoughtfully, his right hand making a gesture towards his gun.

"Who'll carry your sorry carcass around California then, you ingrate? What did you think of the bit you heard, Cipriano?"

"It was very…interesting, Señor."

"Just Scott, Cipriano. Interesting? It's a literary treasure! Just listen to the flow of those words and the picture it paints of a dangerous desperado. Why, it gives at least six different descriptions for Johnny's eyes in about three paragraphs. It takes real skill to do that. What colour eyes do you have, Johnny?"

"You know they're blue," said Johnny. "As any man who ain't blind can see."

"Ah, but only a mundane, literal and unliterary mind would say blue. According to the author your eyes are sapphire, indigo, ultramarine, cobalt, azure and cerulean, and only blue when you're trading glances with saloon floozies." Scott paused and laughed. "I wonder if there's some moral message hidden in there? Never mind. What's more, you have sapphire orbs, I notice, not just run-of-the-mill eyes. And perhaps we'd better not mention the passionate eyes—"

"Best not," said Johnny, looking distrustfully at the book in Scott's hands.

"That's real artistry in this book, Johnny, and worth every cent of the dime I paid for it. It's using language to its utmost."

The Patrón snorted. "Scott, I don't want any bad examples here. I don't want your brother encouraged to use language to its utmost. His is bad enough already."

"And if I can't use language, I don't see why anyone else should be let do it. My eyes are blue and if any man says different—"

"You'll slay him with your smoking Colt. I know."

Señor Johnny made the noise commonly written as Humph! and scowled at his brother.

"Come on, Johnny, you have to admit that the author's obviously seen you in the flesh. He, or she, has your dress sense down to a T. I've seen those shirts and they're extremely flashy."

"It's cra… loco, Boston," complained Johnny, with a wary eye on his father. "All of it."

"Criticise away, little brother," invited Scott.

"Fine. I've told you once I don't drink whiskey if I can get hold of tequila—"

"Ah, tequila is a man's drink," murmured Cipriano appreciatively, and was rewarded with one of the brilliant smiles that he remembered as the _nino_'s.

"See, Cip'll back me on that. Añejo tequila is the stuff God drinks."

Cipriano nodded reverently. He usually drank tequila reposado himself, but when he'd been able to afford it and tasted añejo, it had been smooth as silk.

"I thought that was Islay malt," said the Patrón.

His son dismissed that with a wave of the hand. "Second, I don't know anyone called Nettie, and I don't know a lady in Saltilla called Dolores. I know a lot of gals in Saltilla, but none of them are ladies and none of them are called Dolores. I remember Luisa, though. My, what that gal could do with her—"

"Johnny!" said his father and brother in shocked unison.

"Mierda, you might let a man finish what he was going to say!"

"We didn't dare," said the Patrón, trying to frown.

"I was gonna say what Luisa could do with her guitar. That gal sure loved to sing."

"I'll bet," said Scott, and Cipriano, grinning, agreed. Even the Patrón was smiling.

"And play. She sure loved to play. There was this one game—"

"Johnny!" said the Patrón. "And watch your language. Watch all of them. Teresa speaks Spanish, you know."

"She better not be speakin' that sort of Spanish," said Johnny. He shot the Patrón a look that Cipriano couldn't quite read. "You need to wash out her mouth with soap, Old Man? Isn't that what fathers do?"

The smile was wiped off the Patrón's face. He frowned. "Teresa's my ward, Johnny. She had a father of her own."

"That right?"

Cipriano, glancing at the Patrón, saw how his hand whitened on the handle of his cane, but the Patrón kept his tone even enough.

"Yes, Johnny. That's right."

Señor Scott stepped in quickly. "What else is wrong with the book, then?

Johnny ducked his head and looked down at the colourful quilt. His mouth quirked upward very slightly, but whether it was a smile or a grimace, Cipriano couldn't tell. After a moment he said, allowing Scott's change of subject, "Well, I don't put notches in my gun-belt."

Everyone's eyes seemed drawn to the plain leather gun belt hanging on the bedpost near Johnny's right hand. The Patrón, who'd started to lean back in his chair, stiffened up again,

"It does seem to be the plainest thing about you," conceded Scott. "In the books, all the gunfighters do it."

"Plumb foolish. It ruins good leather, cuttin' notches in it. Whaddya mean, the plainest thing?"

"Flashy dresser, remember?"

"I don't dress flashy!"

Scott hitched up an eyebrow and stared. The Patrón coughed. Cipriano, though, looked down at his own calzoneras and the shirt that Bella had embroidered for him, and smiled.

"We know how to dress, that is all," he said complacently. "These gringos are so plain."

"See, Cip knows! It isn't flashy. It's just a man needs something colourful."

"To express his personality, you mean? Tell me, little brother, what does that pink shirt express about yours?" And at Johnny's look of faint bewilderment: "What does it say about you?"

"It's not pink. It's faded red. 'Sides which, what do those ruffles say about you?"

Scott laughed. "You have me there! The same as that shirt, I suppose: that we are men of taste and discernment. And I'm sure that pink shirt helps you exude menace."

"If I knew what that meant, I probably would shoot you, Boston. Folks is properly respectful, that's all, and that's all I want. Man goes around menacin' folks and he's likely to get himself shot at. Me, I like it quiet."

"Quiet," repeated Scott, and shook his head. "I only wish I could believe that! Anything else?"

"Sure. This here man of taste and discer-whatever-it-was, is too smart to walk into a saloon and go up to the bar that way."

"There's a different way to do it?"

"Boston, walking into a saloon like that is plumb loco. No gunhawk's gonna walk into a place and stand at the door or at the bar with his back to folks like that. If I'd done what that book says, I might as well paint a sign on my jacket telling 'em where to aim. Sure I check it out first, I'm not a fool, but as soon as I get in I step to one side of the doors. I don't want someone to shoot me from the street, right? Then I go straight to a table where I can sit with my back to the wall and get the barkeep to bring me the bottle. How else do you think I've lived this long?"

Cipriano's grin felt frozen on his lips. From the look of him, Señor Scott didn't find the book so amusing any more, either, and the Patrón's face was set. Juanito had just given them an unwelcome insight into life as a top pistolero. Cipriano cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. It was a terrible life and should never have happened to the _nino_ he remembered. Life hadn't been fair or easy for Juanito, he thought, and he looked accusingly at the ghost of Maria Martínez de Lancer who had condemned her son to it. And as is the way with ghosts, she stared indifferently back, beyond reach of the condemnation of any man. He hoped she was within reach of God's.

Cipriano saw the gleam in Johnny's eyes and watched the young one thoughtfully. He didn't think that this was an sidelight shone accidentally upon a gunfighter's world. He wondered who Johnny intended the lesson for.

Scott put the book down gently on the bed between them. "I think we've outworn that joke," he said, blinking rapidly for a second or two.

"You know, Boston, you don't have to go to all this trouble." Johnny poked at the thin, flimsy little novel and frowned at its luridly drawn cover in which—if it were indeed meant to represent Johnny Madrid clutching a fainting, scantily-clad young lady to his chest (Nettie? wondered Cipriano)—he had apparently changed his Stetson for a sombrero and had taken to wearing two guns, one of which he was using to shoot down a war-painted Indian brave of indeterminate tribe but fearsome aspect. "You want to know about it, you should just try askin'."

"Would you answer?" asked Scott.

Johnny shrugged. It must have hurt him, lifting his shoulder like that, but the only sign was a slight tightening of his mouth.

Scott nodded. "All right, Johnny. Why did you choose a life where you can't even walk into a saloon like any other man?"

"Well, you know, sometimes it chooses you," said Johnny, and all the light camaraderie that he and Scott had seemed to share was gone, like the early morning mist over the lake burning off under a strengthening sun.

They stared at each other until Scott, a little pale, nodded again and sat back against the headboard. He tapped one hand against his knee, frowning. Over by the window, the Patrón watched them, eyes hooded and unreadable. Cipriano thought that this was a question to which the Patrón wanted the answer most desperately.

"And sometimes, things just happen," added Johnny but his attention shifted from Señor Scott to his father. "And then there isn't any choice."

The Patrón looked up as if this was the signal he'd waited for. "Or not one that you make yourself," he said. "It wasn't my choice, John. What was yours?"

The ghost of Maria Martínez Lancer was dark as a cloud between them, face averted from both wronged husband and wronged son. If the question was truly for her, she would never answer. She would keep her enigmatic silence.

Johnny frowned, but didn't reply. When the silence grew oppressive, Cipriano cleared his throat again. "I thought, Señ… Johnny, that you'd like to know how your palomino is doing. Eduardo and Jaime looked after the horse until Eduardo left for Stockton to collect his wife and son, and since then Jaime has exercised him every day so he doesn't forget the feel of the saddle. Jaime has done some basic schooling, but only enough so the horse forgets to be wild."

The look he got was sharp with both intelligence and that simmering resentment that Cipriano had seen the day Johnny had arrived. The Patrón had returned to being quiet and watchful, and Johnny let Cipriano have his diversion.

"That's great," said Johnny. Thanks, Cip. Don't let him do too much schooling will you? I want to train my horse myself."

"I know, Johnny. Truly, Jaime is only keeping the horse exercised."

Johnny nodded. "Thanks. Isn't Eduardo your son?"

"Si. He's a little older than Señ… than Scott."

"You used to follow Eduardo around everywhere," said the Patrón, suddenly. "As soon as you could walk, you were his shadow. You thought he was wonderful. I have to say he thought you were as big as nuisance as Jaime."

Johnny frowned. His hands plucked at the quilt, strong fingers pulling on the bright triangles and calico squares, red and blue and green and white. Bella would know what it was, what the gringos called it. They had names even for the ways their women pieced together scraps of fabric into patterns: bears'-paw, or dove-in-the-window, or puss-in-the-corner, or tippecanoe. The patterns were traditional; they had a history and they meant something. Cipriano didn't know which pattern and history this quilt represented. He knew only the patterns Johnny's brown fingers made against the brightness and he grieved for the history behind them, because the patterns made by those twitching, restless fingers spoke of pain, and of tightly-held anger and frustration and even distress.

Scott reached out and daringly ruffled the shock of dark hair. "Would you have followed me around adoringly, if we'd been kids together?"

"We weren't, Boston," said Johnny. His soft drawl had sharpened again.

"You and Jaime are the same age," said Cipriano, quickly. "Jaime's my youngest son. You played together when you were left in our care sometimes, by your mother."

"I don't remember," said Johnny, all sharpness and angles.

"Nor does he, _nino_," said Cipriano, gently. "But it does not make it any the less so."

"I haven't been a _nino_ for a long time," snapped Johnny. He huddled back against his pillows as if retreating into himself.

It was true. It was all too true. Cipriano wondered if the boy had ever had a real childhood, been a carefree _nino_ the way he should have been. He suspected that the only patterns the child had known had been made up of hunger and blows, hate and hardship. He nodded. "Lo siente, Johnny. I was wrong to call you that."

Johnny looked taken-aback at the ready apology. His fingers stilled on the quilt. "De nada," he said, the scowl clearing slowly.

Cipriano sought for another diversion. He briefly considered Bella's manoeuvrings that day but concluded that topic of marriage might be just too diverting for all of them. He opted to offer the book he'd brought, instead. "I found this on the bookshelves downstairs," he said. "I thought you might enjoy it." He handed it over.

Johnny brightened when he looked at it. "de Samaniego! I used to love his stories. Thank you, Cip." He flipped open the book and Cipriano knew when he'd read the inscription. Johnny's mouth tightened again and he flicked a glance at his father. The two looked at each other steadily, until Johnny dropped his gaze to the book again. He closed it up and let it drop to the counterpane. "I'll read it later. I'm a little tuckered right now."

Scott picked up the book to examine it and there was comprehension on his face, as well as some relief. Cipriano realised that, like his father, he had feared that Johnny was illiterate. "You read Spanish, Johnny? Of course, you were brought up in Mexico, so I expect it will be your first language."

"We spoke both at home, but mostly Spanish," said Johnny, shrugging. "I went to school after… I went to school for a year or so once, down in Mexico. They taught me there." He glowered at his father. "Don't the Pinkerton reports tell you that?"

"They do," said the Patrón.

Scott went in fearlessly where others didn't dare. Or maybe he was taking the attention off the Patrón. Or maybe taking his hermano at his word and just asking. "Do you read English too, Johnny?"

"Some. Not so good as Spanish since I never had any real schoolin' in it. I spent some time in jail in Nogales when I was a kid once—" He looked at the Patrón.

"Yes," said the Patrón, his face like stone. "I know about that, too."

"You sure got your dollar's worth, Old Man," said Johnny, bitter as alum. He shifted in the bed, trying to hide a wince, and focused his gaze back onto his hermano. "There was this hombre in there, a gringo, taught me some before they hung him, and I picked up more later. I can manage okay, but Spanish is easier. I'm not a great one for reading anything much, to tell you the truth. I can't carry books about with me, and I like my fun more—" He hesitated.

"Active?" suggested Scott, with a grin. "The kind that involves singing guitar-players like Dolores?"

"Luisa," corrected Johnny. "That's the kind. You got to get her to put the guitar down first, though." Scott laughed, but Johnny's grin was tired and half-hearted. He looked moodily at the Patrón. "You should have just asked, Old Man."

"I should have done a lot of things, John."

"No shit," scoffed Johnny, and this time no-one pulled him up on his language. The Patrón looked away, staring out of the window, and didn't answer.

"I have stayed too long and tired you," said Cipriano, diplomatically. "I will be sure to tell Jaime not to school the horse too much."

"Gracias." Johnny's gaze was fixed on his father.

"I'll come with you, Cip. We still need to discuss the hiring day," said the Patrón, getting to his feet. "Scott? Are you going to join us?"

"I'll keep Johnny company a while longer, sir, if you don't mind. Even if I have been reading aloud under false pretences."

"Keeps you out of trouble, Boston."

"Which I shall translate from the Johnnyese as meaning that you don't mind me reading aloud, so long as it doesn't involve cerulean gazes." Scott reclaimed his seat from Cipriano, taking up one of the books sitting on the night-table. "This is one of my favourites, Johnny. It's by an English writer. I don't know if we can get it in Spanish for you, if you'd prefer it, but if you like I'll write to San Francisco and see."

"Sure," said Johnny.

Cipriano reflected that Señor Scott was a brave young man, as well as a patient and kind one. He was aware of the moody cerulean gaze following him and the Patrón to the door. He turned and nodded to the sons.

"Buenas tardes, señors."

They both smiled at him. Johnny's smile was tired. He looked worn out, and even as Cipriano glanced at him, he slid further down in the bed and closed his eyes.

Scott began: "_I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at __Hull__: He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at __York__, from whence he had married my Mother,__…"_

The Patrón pulled the door to, and the young man's clear, clipped accent became a fainter murmuring, reminding Cipriano of the times he had heard the ocean in the distance.

"It's always the same, if I try and talk to him," said the Patrón, quietly.

The door closed with a hard little snick of the lock.


	5. Chapter 5

Part five

"Ai," said Toledano, wincing in sympathy as Señor Scott made another attempt to turn a recalcitrant cow back into the herd where she belonged. "He looks uncomfortable."

"He isn't used to our saddles," said Cipriano, watching critically as Scott tried to get his cow pony to obey his commands.

"Still," said Toledano, "he does not give up."

Cipriano grunted and rode over to join the Señor. "You are trying to ride him as a cavalry officer, Señ… Scott," he said, seeing that one of the problems came from how upright and straight Scott was sitting in the saddle, "You must relax, and learn to use your weight as well as your knees and bridle to give the horse his instructions. He's a good cow pony and he wants to work with you."

"I'm trying," said Señor Scott, breathless.

"I know. Look, like this. The horses are trained to respond to the rein. I want my horse to go right, so I press the rein against the left side of her neck and she turns away from it. Just the slightest signal is enough."

Scott nodded. "I see. They're better trained than the cavalry mounts I remember, even an officer's mount. A couple that I had in the War had very hard mouths and were difficult to work."

"Si, but cow ponies are trained to respond to the neck rein, not the bit. They are much better trained. The Army takes only green-broke horses even now, and during the war they would have spent even less time on them. But a cow pony is as much part of a vaquero's tools, a cowboy's tools, as his boots or hat or rope"

"Or his gun?" Scott touched the butt of his borrowed Colt with a wry grin. The Patrón had made him wear it; it was unthinkable that a man would ride the range without one. He wore the gun high, as he would have carried his Army Colt during the war, and was obviously still very conscious of the unaccustomed weight. It didn't look comfortable on him yet.

"Si. Or his gun." Cipriano's hand drifted to the smooth, comforting handgrips of his own pistol. "There is a gunsmith in Green River. We have time to see him before we start the hiring tomorrow. He could help you decide on which pistol would suit you best and find you a better-fitting belt."

Scott gave him a sideways glance. "Rather than wait until I can get Johnny's advice, you mean?"

"Whatever suits you," said Cipriano, surprised. "It may be some time before your hermano will be well enough."

Scott stared out across the Lancer range for a few moments. "I'll wait for Johnny, Cip. He has to know as much as the gunsmith does."

"Si. Well, even if you don't get a gun tomorrow, you should buy yourself some work gloves."

"Yes," agreed Scott, looking ruefully at the reddened palm of his right hand. "I will."

Cipriano waved the signal to Toledano to cut the cow out of the herd again. "Now, Scott, try again. Use the rein as I showed you and see how it works."

Scott obeyed, and the sharp little cow pony he was riding turned smartly to the right, allowing him to haze the cow back to her herdmates.

"¡Bueno!" said Cipriano, pleased.

Scott smiled.

x

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Cipriano was surprised at how quickly Johnny was up and about. Only the day after his visit, Maria Morales told him, Johnny had got up for a couple of hours, moving slowly with his hermano's help from his bed to the chair in the window. Within a day or two of that he was venturing downstairs with Scott and the Patrón hovering anxiously in case of still-shaky legs. Their solicitude seemed to goad Johnny, but in deference to the injunction to watch his language where Teresa might hear him, the one remonstrance he made that Cipriano had overheard was positively mild—"I ain't going to fall over, Boston! Go away!"—and consequently was ignored by his brother as he was helped to the long seat on the hacienda's loggia. Johnny spent that morning reclining there in the warm Spring sun, cleaning his gun and reading de Samaniego while awaiting the doctor and the chance to protest that he was in perfect good health and should be allowed full liberty. Cipriano thought the entire estancia must have heard the Sam Jenkins's emphatic rebuttal of that particular proposal.

Four or five days after Cipriano had visited the sick room, he was surprised and pleased when Señors Johnny and Scott returned the visit. It was probably the longest walk that Johnny had attempted since getting up for the first time, and the young one was breathing hard (and attempting to hide it) when he and his hermano arrived on the west-facing porch of Cipriano's house after supper, just as the last of the sun dipped towards the horizon.

Bella was indoors settling the sad little Bocanegra ninos into their beds, while Cipriano and Jaime were indulging themselves in a final, post-supper pipe—Bella having set her face against smoking in her house.

"You are very welcome, Señors," said Cipriano, knocking out the embers of his pipe onto the soft earth of the garden and carefully grinding them into ash. Jaime followed suit, grinning with embarrassment. He stared openly at Johnny until Cipriano coughed to remind him of his manners. "Come in! My wife will be delighted to see you."

"It's the Señora that we've come to see," said Johnny, with a friendly grin for Jaime. "Boston here says he's seen far too much of you, the last few days."

"Your hermano is doing very well," reproved Cipriano.

"Actually, seeing Cipriano isn't the problem. It's my horse I'd rather see less of." And Señor Scott sighed. "It's been years since I spent so much time in the saddle."

"You'll harden up," said Johnny.

"That's what worries me. I'm hoping for more resilience, not a rear end as hard as granite. Believe me, brother, there are places where I don't want calluses."

Cipriano chuckled. "Come on in, Señors, and take some tequila with us. My wife has soft and comfortable cushions."

"Good," said Señor Scott, taking his revenge. "Because Johnny was only supposed to visit the barn so he could kiss that horse of his goodnight but he insisted on coming down here. He's walked too far and he needs to rest before starting back. I'll be damned before I carry him home."

"I'm not that tired, Boston, and I'm not that heavy."

"It's a bad habit you're getting into with that, Johnny, and it's my duty to break you of it."

Cipriano waved them into the house, grinning. He noted that despite all Señor Scott said, he hovered protectively over his younger brother. Señor Johnny, as seemed to be universal with younger brothers, rolled his eyes derisively and, of course, allowed the attention.

They paused on the threshold to have a brief, but intense, fraternal discussion about Johnny's gun belt. Scott persuaded him to take it off.

"I don't see why you have to wear it at all on the ranch," said Scott, exasperated.

"You want me to wear pants around the ranch?" enquired Johnny. " 'Cause to tell you the truth, it's more likely I'd not wear pants than not wear my gun."

"You can't need it, surely. You're on the ranch, Johnny, not a saloon in town. It's safe here." Scott paused, evidently remembering where his hermano got shot. "Well, it is now Pardee's dead."

Johnny's eyes danced with amusement. "I've been shot in a barn afore now," he said. "Fact is, I've been shot more times out of towns than in 'em."

Scott's mouth thinned down, lips compressing until he looked astonishingly like the Patrón, but he said nothing more. Cipriano was interested to see the likeness. Until then, he had thought Scott more like the first Señora Lancer, with her pale Northern complexion and her pale hair and her pale blue eyes. It was good to see some of the Patrón's strength and will there alongside her cool reserve.

They watched in silence as Johnny took a deep breath and held it, tensing his stomach muscles enough to give him enough play on the leather belt to allow him to unbuckle it. He relaxed with a little whoosh of air, swinging the belt free of his hips and coiling it around the holster.

"How can you wear it so tightly?" asked Jaime, fascinated.

Johnny grinned at him, hefting the gun in his hands. "Just the way it has to be, amigo. You get used to it."

Cipriano hoped devoutly that Jaime would never get used to anything of the kind. He ushered in his guests, calling for his wife to come and see who was visiting, and telling Johnny to leave his gun on the table by the door. Johnny obeyed, with obvious reluctance.

Bella was delighted to see them. She had met Scott already and had approved. He was a young man of good sense and manners, she thought, her only doubts being that he was an Easterner and, she understood, one of great education. She didn't know what the estancia could offer to hold such a one here, and that fear, that they'd once again lose an heir, nagged at her as it nagged at all of the estancia. She had been a little reassured by Cipriano's account of Señor Scott's dogged determination, these last few days, to learn the skills he'd need if he stayed. That promised well, but none of them would breathe easy until the partnership agreement was signed.

She hadn't seen Johnny, except from a distance as he lay on the long seat on the loggia, complaining to Sam Jenkins. When he walked into the room behind his brother and she came to meet them, her smile was warm and open, Señora Isabella's formality not as evident as it would normally be in company. It was so uncharacteristically open of her, that even Cipriano stared. She held Johnny's hands a little longer than necessary for strict politeness, too.

"I am so happy to see you, Juanito, and that you're getting well," she said.

Johnny grimaced slightly at the name, but Cipriano was pleased, and a little surprised, at his display of good manners. He swept off his hat and bowed over Bella's hands, kissing the right with grace and rather more charm than Cipriano (who was a careful husband) was strictly comfortable with, and greeting her with a flow of idiomatic Spanish that expressed polite enquiries after her health; even though, said Johnny, he could see that she was blooming. That Bella was charmed was obvious to everyone, even her smirking younger son.

"You could learn some good manners yourself, you _pillo_," said Jaime's mother good-naturedly, not having missed Jaime's grin. She tousled his hair as she passed him, leading Johnny to the most comfortable seat in the room.

"You don't mean to use Johnny as your example, do you, Señora Isabella?" Scott demanded incredulously, and Cipriano wondered idly as he collected the tequila and the narrow little caballito glasses, whether his hermano or his father had explained the nuances needed when addressing married Spanish-Mexican ladies.

"He has very good manners," approved Bella.

"I should," said Johnny, laughing. "My stepfather whopped me until I learned some and then the priests took over. Guess you didn't use the belt on Jaime then." He ignored the strained, almost palpable curiosity that followed his words and turned that all-too-charming smile back on. "You have a real nice home, Señora Isabella."

He wasn't mocking them, but seemed to mean it. He sat back carefully on the sofa, smiling at her when she took the seat beside him, looking around with appreciative eyes.

"The Patrón is very generous," said Bella.

"Reminds me of houses back home to Mexico," he said, with one more look around the little whitewashed room. He laughed again. "Not that I ever lived in one this fine or this big, but it's nice. Real nice."

Cipriano thought of the hacienda great room and its many other rich and comfortable rooms, and sighed. He supposed that comfort was a relative thing, but he hadn't considered before that it might be intimidating. He pulled a small table closer and put down the tequila. Scott, who had been watching his brother, turned the same troubled look he'd been giving Johnny onto the bottle.

"I've been warned about tequila," he said. "Murdoch says it kicks like a bad-tempered mule with a headache."

"The Patrón has no head for tequila," said Cipriano. "But then, I have none for the whiskey he likes."

"Me neither," said Johnny, with an appreciative glance at the bottle in Cipriano's hands. "Now you're a Californian, Boston, you have to learn how to take shots. Some folks up this side of the border just toss it back, and suck on limes and salt to wash it down. That's okay for the rough stuff, the blanco – makes it taste less like it'll blow your head off – but not for what Cip has here, not for a tequila reposado. You don't just toss this back. Treat it like the Old Man's good sippin' whiskey."

"Should you be having any at all?"

"Try and stop me, Boston."

"I could," mused Scott. "You aren't armed."

"I'm always armed," said Johnny, grinning. He nodded to the table near the door and the coiled up gun belt that Jaime could barely take his eyes off. "That's just the gun you can see,"

Scott stared then shook his head. "You're carrying that Derringer? On the ranch? Don't tell me you have the knife in your boot too!"

Johnny took his tequila, still grinning at his hermano over the rim of the glass, and didn't answer. "Oh this is good, Cipriano. A de Cuervo, huh? I didn't think they sold their reposado this far north. I've never seen anything but their blanco for sale north of the border and they never send the best of that."

"I brought a case back from Tijuana, my last trip buying horses for the Patrón. I bought the most wonderful stallion, Johnny. A buckskin. You would have liked him." Cipriano watched Señor Scott's cautious sipping at the tequila. "Pardee stole him, and shot O'Brien and the Patrón when they went to Morro Coyo to get the horse back. Pardee rode the horse himself."

Johnny looked up. "I saw the horse he was ridin'. Fine animal. Did you get it back after Boston here killed him?"

Cipriano nodded. "We did, but Pardee hadn't been able to cope with him and had him gelded. He's still a good horse, but he won't help improve our stock, as we had hoped."

"Shame." Johnny grimaced and looked at Scott. " See, you don't need to have Pardee on your conscience, Boston."

"He isn't." Scott sipped again at his tequila. "This is very smooth," he said, and Cipriano approved of the good manners that kept the surprise out of his voice.

Jaime had given his mother a small glass. "It's a special occasion," he said, raising his own glass in salute to her. " A celebration."

"We are glad to have you back, Juanito," said Bella, sipping delicately at the tequila. "You have been much missed."

Johnny saluted her back. "That right?" He changed the subject immediately. "We really came to see you tonight. Señora Isabella."

She smiled at him, after one swift glance at Cipriano. "Indeed?"

"I have you to thank for these," he said, gesturing to his clothes. "Murdoch told me you helped him get the right things." He was wearing the blue-flowered shirt and the new bolero, decorated, like his old one, with gold braid. The shirt made his eyes look intensely blue in his tanned face.

Bella smiled. "I was happy to do it. What woman does not enjoy shopping?"

"Well, I'm real grateful. Murdoch's insisted on giving me the jacket and he said you're working on stitchin' a new white shirt for me for best."

"It is finished," she said. "I was going to send it up in the morning."

"Well, I tell you I'm real grateful. Murdoch says you're the finest embroideress in the San Joaquin and well, accordin' to Boston here, I'm a flashy dresser, so the more stitchin' the better. 'Course, I'm still wonderin' why Murdoch thinks he has to give me a new shirt and jacket at all—"

"I heard you wondering," remarked Scott. "I should think the entire San Joaquin Valley heard you wondering and then the entire San Joaquin Valley heard Murdoch wondering right back at you."

Johnny was very still. "I get my own stuff, Boston."

"We know, Johnny. Mind you, I think Murdoch's having to cut your old jacket and your shirt off you is a good enough reason for getting you some replacements."

"It weren't Murdoch shot me in the back. Come to that, ol' Day's the one owes me a new shirt."

"Good luck with getting him to pay up."

Johnny relaxed. His laugh sounded genuine. "You shot him. You dig him up and make him pay."

Scott smiled. "He paid, Johnny-my-boy. He paid."

"That was some good shootin'," conceded Johnny. He accepted a second glass of tequila. "This is really good stuff, Cip. Well, Señora Isabella, I'll be pleased to have a new shirt. A man can't carry too much around with him in his saddlebags and three shirts is more'n I usually have."

"You are settled now, Juanito, You are a land-owner, a ranchero."

"Well, I aim to be, anyway," said Johnny.

Well that was closer to the truth than Bella's hopeful certainties. Cipriano watched as Bella smiled at Johnny and patted his hand, relieved that she didn't mention the other shirts she was working on. Cipriano had shared his misgivings with her about Johnny's likely reaction and both had wondered how the Patrón would handle it. Indeed, Cipriano wished he knew how the Patrón had persuaded Johnny to accept the blue shirt and the jacket; that was one discussion he was sorry he'd missed.

"You will be a fine ranchero," said Bella. "You need to look like a fine caballero now."

"Yeah," said Johnny with a wry grin and a small, almost inaudible sigh. "Takes some gettin' used to."

Scott gave him a sharp look and turned the conversation to his travails as the 'greenest of greenhorns' as he said ruefully, making Bella laugh with his plaintive complaints about Cipriano's training methods. Jaime, who was a little wide-eyed at the thought that in Boston there were no herds of cattle at all, joined in with encouragement and advice; most of which Cipriano, on the general principle that the young needed constant correction, negated and argued against even when, as he magisterially admitted, Jaime was right.

"Is he asleep?" Cipriano asked after a few minutes in which he and Jaime had explained and debated the finer points of hazing, bull-dogging and branding, with particular reference to the coming Spring round-up, Cipriano having decided that Johnny would find a discussion about the vaquero method of breaking and training horses too interesting and stimulating.

"Yes." Scott took the empty glass from Johnny's slackened grasp, gently unclasping the long, lax fingers. "I'm sorry Cip, Señora Isabella. It's just that he's not as strong yet as he thinks he is and he's tired himself out walking this far—"

"Don't apologise," Bella offered a cushion and, as Scott eased his hermano down against the sofa's arm until he was half-sitting, half-lying, slipped it under Johnny's head. "It is barely ten days since he was injured. I think that he is still in pain, also."

"I think you're right, but he won't admit it if he is," said Scott, his smile rueful. He put the back of his hand against Johnny's face for a moment. "Well, he's not feverish, at least. I think he just wore himself out. I'll let him rest for a few minutes if you don't mind, before trying to get him home." He took a watch from his vest pocket. "Murdoch will be wondering what's taking us so long."

Cipriano nodded to Jaime, who tossed back the remains of his tequila in a way that made Cipriano vow never to give his son the good tequila again and slipped out, grinning at Cipriano's threats.

"Thank you, Cip," said Scott. He looked at his hermano with a bemused expression. "At least he doesn't snore. It just concerns me a little, because he must have really worn himself out to fall asleep like this. I hope I'm not around when Sam Jenkins hears about it."

"Do not tell him," said Cipriano, with a shrug, and like Scott, leaving unsaid the speculation about how Johnny's exhaustion must have overcome the ingrained gunhawk caution, although Cipriano would rather hope it signalled that Johnny was beginning to trust them. He thought that was Scott's hope, too. "I do not think your hermano will. Now, we were talking of the Spring round-up—"

They resumed their talk, keeping their voices low as they discussed the new hires and Cipriano explained in detail how the estancias worked together to bring all the roaming cattle together and brand the calves, and how those calves with no obviously branded mothers were dealt with. Bella, uninterested, picked up her embroidery, working on covering the front plackets of the dark green shirt with stitching in silk of the same dark green and some of the coppery brown, picked out with gold. Only the good Dios knew how the Patrón would get Johnny to accept that one. Or the others. Bella caught his eye and smiled, serenely.

Scott's eyebrow hitched up as he listened. "It's like planning a military campaign," he said, "I hadn't realised that it was so complex."

Cipriano nodded. "We have obligations to the other estancias. It is a matter of pride that we fulfil those to the best of our ability. The other rancheros know how badly Lancer was hit by Pardee, and it will not do to display any weaknesses."

Scott blinked at that. "Do you mean that the other ranchers aren't friendly? They'd take advantage?"

"Well, they may seek to push the Patrón harder over things like water access, if they think he's weakened and cannot defend Lancer; or try and charge for us driving a herd over their land, or be more grasping when it comes to us replacing stock. It's a matter of business, Scott, and they are all business men." Cipriano glanced up as the door opened. "Patrón," he said, rising in greeting.

Bella looked up and smiled a welcome, but she did not rise, careful not to disturb Johnny beside her.

The Patrón nodded, looking a little grim. "Is he all right?" he demanded, as soon as he'd greeted Bella.

"Just worn out, I think," Scott said. "I didn't mean for you to trail down here, sir."

"I thought you might need some help to get him back." The Patrón sounded gruff and half-annoyed, but his expression said _worried_ and _concerned._

Scott nodded. "Let me wake him." He slipped onto his knees by Johnny's half-recumbent body, and put his hand firmly on his brother's right wrist, holding it down against Johnny's side; he'd learned that much already, then. With his free hand, he shook Johnny's shoulder lightly. "C'mon, Johnny. Time to go home."

Johnny came awake shockingly fast when he was shaken, sitting bolt upright, his breath hissing between his teeth in surprise or (more likely) pain. His right hand made an abortive move towards his hip where his gun should be, but Scott's grip was firm and held him still.

"Uuuuh," he said.

"Easy," soothed Scott. "Easy. It's just me."

Johnny stared, so tense that Cipriano's bones ached in sympathy. He breathed deeply and quickly, before slumping back against the sofa. That brought another hiss of pain. He ducked his head, but not before Cipriano saw in his eyes the flash of fear and… what?... chagrin, perhaps.

"I was asleep?"

"Like a baby," said Scott, releasing his hold on Johnny's wrist and sitting back on his heels. "All right?"

Johnny nodded, his mouth twisting briefly. "Gettin' too comfortable," he said in a savage undertone, before turning to Bella and turning the grimace into the charming smile. "Lo siente, Señora—"

"There is no reason for you to be sorry," she said, and put a hand over his. "You have done too much today, Juanito. You need to be more careful of yourself."

Johnny shot a glance at the Patrón, who leaned on his cane watching, his face not showing much of what he thought. "I'm fine, Señora. But I am sorry for sleepin' on your sofa. Isn't right, in company."

Bella smiled. "It isn't the first time." She looked up at Jaime and the smile broadened.

"I've picked you up from here before," said the Patrón suddenly. "Sometimes your… sometimes you were here when I came in from the range and I'd come down to get you, and you and Jaime would be fast asleep on the sofa, curled up together like a pair of puppies."

Johnny's shoulders rose defensively. He swallowed, and his tongue flicked out over his lower lip, but he didn't seem to have anything to say. He looked away, his fingers tapping restlessly against his thigh where his holster should be. He'd tensed back up again, until Cipriano was reminded of nothing more than a bow, the string pulled back taut with the arrow trembling on the nock.

Scott got to his feet. He looked from his hermano to the Patrón and the resemblance was there again, in the way he and the Patrón both tightened their mouths and narrowed their eyes when they were angry. And Scott was angry, Cipriano realised with a shock of recognition for the momentary blaze in the pale blue eyes the young man had inherited from his mother. It was the mirror of the look he'd seen in the pistolero's eyes when Johnny had jumped down from the back of the wagon, the day they'd arrived. Cipriano couldn't be certain why Scott shared Johnny's anger—that was something to reflect on, to ponder, that both, perhaps, resented abandonment and lies. He was certain that he was seeing the same anger, the same bitterness, but where Johnny Madrid had fairly thrummed with it, here it was hidden so much more effectively under the pale, civilised veneer.

It was gone again in an instant, shuttered away behind those pale eyes. Scott said, his tone easy again, "You know, brother, you must have been the oddest looking baby. Every time Murdoch mentions you, he talks about puppies. And you without the soulful brown eyes, too."

Johnny shot Scott a dark, savage look. "Yeah You reckon the brown eyes would've saved this puppy a kickin' or two?" He pushed himself to his feet suddenly. It was too much, too fast and too soon: he wavered visibly, and Scott leapt forward to catch him by both arms to steady him.

"Take your time," Scott said, frowning. "What's your hurry?"

Johnny looked down at the hand on his biceps, then up into Scott's face. He studied it for a few seconds, his own expressionless. Scott's expression changed under Johnny's scrutiny, from concern to a slow realisation that he'd said or done something with far more weight to it than he could have intended. Bella watched them, looking distressed.

"Johnny," the Patrón said, very softly. "John."

Johnny glanced at him.

"Not here, son," urged the Patrón. "Not right now."

Johnny returned to studying Scott.

"What is it?" asked Scott, looking from one to the other in bewilderment, the bitterness no longer visible. He released Johnny now that his hermano was steady on his feet. "What did you mean—"

"Let's get Johnny home," interrupted the Patrón, in the tone that made it clear he wasn't going to brook any argument or allow any more discussion. He glanced at Cipriano, who nodded and rose, and just for a moment his frustration and something of the old pain and anguish showed, the pain that had been distilling for twenty years. "Thank you, Cip, Señora Isabella. Jaime."

Bella stood and took Johnny's right hand in hers. The other she laid gently on his left shoulder for an instant before cupping the side of his face to pull his attention to her. "No se enoja con su hermano, Juanito," she said softly. "Él no sabe. Él no puede entender." She let her hand fall away again.

Johnny turned the intense gaze from his brother's face to hers. For a moment he looked so dangerous that Cipriano's heart juddered and he took a step forward to pull Bella away. Then Johnny's expression softened, the cold-eyed pistolero was gone and the charming boy was back. He smiled the heartbreaking smile that Cipriano remembered. "Yo sé, Señora Isabella. Yo sé. It's all right." He left his right hand in hers and raised the left slowly and hesitantly, as if it pained him to use it, and rubbed it over his face. "I'm just a mite tired. Lo siente."

"Murdoch?" queried Scott, quietly.

"Later. Johnny, you're worn out. Come on back to the house and rest."

"Yes." Johnny glanced at Scott. "It's all right, Boston."

"Go and rest," said Bella, squeezing his hand and reaching up to kiss his cheek as if he had been Jaime.

He looked startled and, suddenly and very briefly, incredibly sad, the smile dying as the corners of his mouth dragged down. It was only an instant, then all expression was smoothed away again and he was safe behind his gunfighter's mask. "If I sleep as well as I did on your sofa, Señora, I'll be fine." Johnny glanced at Jaime, and grinned. "On my own, if you don't mind, Jaime."

Jaime nodded and grinned back. "Ciertamente, Señor Johnny. Mama said all we did was fight anyway."

"Not always, Jaime," protested Bella. "Only sometimes, and mostly over the wooden horse."

"His or mine?" asked Johnny, pulling the bolero straight and fastening it.

"That was the problem," said Cipriano, puzzling over the way the stresses and friction between the three Lancers came and went almost as if they were living and breathing wild things, and certainly as skittish and unpredictable. It was as capricious as a flame's dance. "Ownership was disputed."

"It was Jaime's," said the Patrón, watching Johnny with the same intensity that Johnny had watched Scott. "You never wanted to give it back."

With a nod of thanks, Johnny took the gun belt that a subdued Scott brought him. He hefted it in his hand, grimacing. He didn't put it back on, just looped it over his arm. "Do I owe you a horse, Jaime?"

Jaime laughed. "No, Johnny, no. The little Arturo, Eduardo's son, has Barranca now."

Johnny allowed his hermano and the Patrón to guide him to the door. "Barranca?"

"That's what you insisted on calling him, Juanito," said Bella. "It stuck. Buenas noches, nino. Duerme bien."

"Buenas noches," said Johnny. And through the chorus of goodnights and good wishes, he said, trying to laugh, "Barranca? What sort of name is that for a horse?"

Translations:

No se enoja con su hermano, Juanito. Él no sabe. Él no puede entender. Don't be angry with your brother, Johnny. He doesn't know. He can't understand.

Yo se. I know.

Ciertamente Certainly

Duerme bien Sleep well


	6. Chapter 6

A/N Thank you to everyone who commented, and to those to whom I can't respond directly ; JML, Joe, Lancerfan and Johnnyfan

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**Tamales and Beans Part 6**

Toledano straightened his back, holding the bawling calf firmly by the head to stop its struggles. This was an indisputable Lancer calf, its anxious mother branded with the distinctive circled L (a florid and grandiose letter, Cipriano thought, privately) that marked all the Lancer stock. Toledano had spotted the calf the previous day, limping slowly along behind the herd. And while they wouldn't brand the calf to match its mother until the following week's Spring Round-up with the neighbouring estancias—there was an etiquette to these things that Cipriano found quite satisfying and wouldn't break—they were going to take it into the corrals near the ranch to treat the gash on its left hind leg and allow it to heal.

"Is that Señor Johnny?" asked Toledano, with a jerk of his head to the left of them.

Cipriano followed the direction of Toledano's gaze, seeing the Patrón's son dashing across the far hillside on a golden horse. He nodded as the distant horseman put the palomino at a fence, watching the tiny figures sail over the obstacle as if winged.

Cipriano knew very well that while the Patrón's youngest son had finally been given a measure of freedom from the doctor's restrictions, that measure was intended to be a small and carefully regulated one. Talking nearby with the Patrón and Señor Scott, Cipriano had heard the doctor give his instructions: _You can ride a little_, Sam Jenkins had said, _but not that half-wild palomino you've been talking my ear off about and if I hear of you going faster than a sedate trot before I tell you that you can, then you and I shall have words, young man_. The Patrón had stopped speaking to listen anxiously, and had been gruffly defensive when he caught Cipriano's knowing glance.

"Si," he said, mildly enough. "Juanito's idea of a gentle ride does not seem to match exactly with Doctor Jenkins'. "

"He rides fast, that one," said Toledano, always one to state the obvious. "Ai, but remember that morning!"

Cipriano was unlikely to forget it. His finger had been squeezing the trigger of his rifle when the Patrón recognised his errant younger son as the lead horseman in the mad dash to the hacienda. Cipriano had been within a hair's breadth of shooting the prodigal off the horse and he had had to exercise great control to slowly release the tension on the trigger so the gun didn't fire. A few seconds later and Johnny had tumbled hard from the saddle with Day Pardee's bullet in his back. Cipriano had thanked the good Dios that it hadn't been his bullet that had brought the boy to the ground. It had been too close.

Cipriano glanced over to Scott. The young man was sitting in the saddle, as rigidly as he had that first day when he'd started work on the estancia, back straight as a ramrod. Cipriano touched his heels to Amaranthe's sides, and the mare stepped lightly over to join him. Scott's face was set as rigidly as his back as he watched his hermano take another fence before disappearing over the hill and out of sight. Scott continued staring for a few moments, but Johnny and the palomino didn't return.

"Tell me, Cipriano, do you have brothers?"

"Si," said Cipriano. "Two. Both younger than me."

"Are they still alive? And if they are, would you mind telling me how you managed not to strangle them?"

"I am a man of very even temperament, Scott."

Scott turned and stared at him.

"Although," admitted Cipriano, keeping his face straight, "it's true that my brother Eduardo still has a scar from the time when my temperament was tried to the point when it became a little less even and, I remember, we ended up in the creek. We started the fight in the barn and to this day neither of us know how we got to the creek. Still, it was effective. Whatever it was that Eduardo did to annoy me never happened again."

"That's very helpful, Cip. Thank you." Scott sighed. "No creek near the house, though. That's a drawback."

"I think the well may be too deep, but we have a horse trough," remarked Cipriano.

Scott nodded. "Very true. You know, Cip, I may find a use for that horse trough later."

Cipriano smiled. Scott was an apt pupil.

x

x

Johnny was lying at full stretch on the long seat on the loggia, when Cipriano and Scott arrived to discuss with the Patrón the final arrangements for the Spring round-up. They thought he was asleep but just as Scott, who was still tense with whatever emotion had wracked him when he saw Johnny and the palomino, stepped onto the loggia, Johnny spoke without opening his eyes.

"You might want to wait a couple of minutes, Boston. Frank just brought the post in and Murdoch's got something there he ain't too happy about. I'd reckon it was a bill, only it's too thick for that. Maybe it's a love letter. I hightailed it outa there before he could work hisself up over it and look around for someone to blame. I was too handy."

"You're joining us for this meeting, aren't you?" asked Scott, all affability.

"Sure. Afternoon, Cip." Johnny sat up slowly. His eyes showed no sign of sleepiness that Cipriano could see, although he thought that Johnny looked stiff and he certainly eased his back and shoulders carefully. Johnny added, sadly, "Mind you, I don't think the Doc is gonna let me ride the round-up much."

Scott snorted. "Well, you just keep up with those sedate trots on the gentle fully-broken non-palomino horse that Doctor Jenkins ordered to build up your strength, and we'll have to see, won't we?"

Johnny looked down at his boots, his mouth turning up. "Sure."

"You might want to take your sedate trots over on the west pastures for the next few days, away from where we're working," said Scott, still affable. "That way no-one will see you not jumping your gentle, fully-broken non-palomino horse over fences that aren't there."

Johnny glanced up quickly. His eyes were bright with amusement. "Good advice, Boston. I'll take it."

"I don't know why you should. You don't take other people's good advice."

"Well," said Johnny in a reasonable tone, "If I knew what a sedate trot was, I'd be sure to take it."

"I'm sure you would." Scott put out a hand and pulled to help as Johnny got to his feet. "In fact, you'd better, because I'm damned serious about not hauling you around California on my back if something happens to you."

"That so?" said Johnny, softly.

Cipriano smiled, and stroked his moustache. "You may have to use the horse trough, Scott."

"I'm tempted. No more, little brother. I'm not happy about you not listening to what Sam Jenkins tells you."

Johnny looked bewildered. "Why?"

"Are you serious? You almost died!"

"I'm fine."

"You're pushing yourself too hard, Johnny, and it's worrying us. For heaven's sake, take it a little easier and let yourself heal. Do what the doctor wants."

"I've had worse, Boston, and I know what I can handle and how far I can push." Johnny looked from one to the other, and shook his head, exasperated. "You don't get it, do you? Look, I gotta keep pushin'. It's takin' too long for me to get back and it isn't safe. Most times I don't get to sit around getting fattened up by the likes of Teresa and Maria. Most times I just gotta get myself picked up, real fast. I can't be laid up. I just can't. There's too many would like a chance at me."

"Here? On Lancer? You're safe here, surely?"

"You think they gonna stop at that arch out there and think, nope, won't try and take ol' Johnny today, he's on Lancer land? It'll be anywhere and anytime. It's never safe."

Cipriano sighed. The nino meant it. It was sad, and enlightening. He remembered the conversation he'd had with Bella when Johnny was still sick, and he still wondered what it was the nino wanted. He thought that what Johnny was then and was now, what Johnny did then and wanted to do now (they all hoped) were still in conflict.

Scott put out his hand again to grasp Johnny by the forearm, but this time his voice was gentler. "I asked you once why you chose that life, Johnny. If this is what it's really like, why did you?"

"Oh, Boston," said Johnny, and sighed. "You really want to know?"

"I wouldn't ask if I didn't. Tell me, Johnny."

Johnny looked at him intently before turning his head to stare out over Teresa's flower garden to the wide land beyond. His mouth twisted. "Because I've got blue eyes."

"What?"

"Because I've got them blue eyes that damned dime novel was usin' language about, that you thought was so funny. They're blue, Boston! Not soulful brown puppy dog eyes. They're god-damned blue."

Scott raised both hands in bewilderment. "I don't understand."

"I know you don't." Johnny stood for a minute, his right hand tapping patterns against his gun holster, and again Cipriano thought the patterns were of anger and bitterness and distress. He took in a deep breath, and said, visibly calmer, "And you know, I'm glad you don't." He turned to walk away.

"Johnny—"

"Just give me a minute, okay? Just a minute." He walked to the other end of the loggia and leant up against one of the pillars, looking out across the wide, fertile valley land to the mountains, to where they reached up into sky as pale and translucent as distant ghosts. Cipriano noticed that he leant on his left shoulder, even though that couldn't be comfortable, and kept his gun hand free. He sighed, wondering if the nino would ever feel safe in his own home; in what he hoped and prayed would be the nino's home.

Scott turned to Cipriano. "Wha—?"

"His eyes mark him as a mestizo," said Cipriano, reluctantly. "A half-breed. The life of a mestizo child in the border towns with no-one to take care of him and protect him, no-one to stand between him and the people, both Mexican and gringo, who hate half-breeds… I can't tell you how hard that is, Señor Scott. Many do not survive it. And those that do, many are broken by it. All they know is hate and blows and hunger."

"Because his mother was Mexican?"

"And the Patrón is a gringo, si." Cipriano added, very softly, "He was very young, your hermano, when he was left to face this alone."

"How young?"

"Eleven."

Scott's mouth thinned right down until his lips were white. He nodded and blew out a noisy, sad breath. "Damn," he said, very quietly but with emphasis.

Cipriano nodded. "Si."

Scott nodded his thanks, although Cipriano knew he couldn't have any real understanding of the hell that had been the nino's childhood. But Scott, he thought, would try. Scott would always try.

Scott gave Johnny his minute or two and went to join him. "It was a stupid question," he said.

"No," said Johnny. "It was a stupid choice."

"You said that the life chose you, remember."

"About half and half, I'd say." Johnny turned his head, and the blue eyes that had been his curse and his damnation were sombre. "It's not.. it was a long time ago. What did Cip tell you?"

"That it was hellishly bad for you, as a child."

Johnny's gaze met Cipriano's. "Did the Old Man give you the Pinkerton reports to read?"

"Si, when I became Segundo. And because he knew that Bella and I wanted you back almost as much as he did. Every trip I have made to Mexico, I looked for you, Juanito. I saw how it was along the border, how it must have been for you."

"Yeah," said Johnny, and his eyes darkened. He looked back at Scott. "It hasn't been like that for me for a long time. Because you know what? When I realised I was good with this—" he tapped the grips of his pistol "—it stopped. They didn't like me any better, but they stopped. They stopped calling names. They stopped spittin'. They stopped beatin' up on me. They fuckin' walk small, Boston. They let me be, and they walk small and that's all I want. It's all I ever wanted."

"Nino," said Cipriano, softly, gently, feeling something in his chest lurch with pain.

"It's okay, Cip. It's done with. " He tapped his gun again. "This's just a trade, that's all, and I get along. I get along just fine. I'm good at my job."

"I'm glad you were good at your job, Johnny," said Scott. "And I'm glad you're here."

Johnny straightened up and turned to face them properly, everything behind the mask again. He nodded. "Yeah. I was thinkin' that this isn't anythin' like the border. It's real pretty here, isn't it?" He gestured towards the ghost mountains holding up the distant sky.

"Yes," said Scott. "It's nothing like Boston either. I'm only just coming to realise that I've been looking for a place that isn't anything like Boston, to start again."

Johnny looked surprised as if wondering what his hermano had to put behind him. "Is that what you want? To start over?"

"I'm tired of Boston, Johnny. I'm tired of having nothing to do. You'd think it would be a great life, wouldn't you, having so much money that you didn't have to do anything, didn't have to work or do anything but enjoy yourself. I hated it. It wears you down, in the end, so you don't even want to get out of bed in the morning. There's nothing to get out of bed for. So, yes, I want to start over. I want to do something different and build something new. This is going to be a good place to do that."

The French windows were flung open. "Johnny!" roared the Patrón.

"Of course," said Scott, without missing a beat. "It isn't going to be a quiet place."

It surprised a choke of laughter out of Johnny that sounded more real than anything Cipriano had heard so far. Scott grinned back, his eyes bright. The tension drained away.

"Reckon he has a tune he wants to call," drawled Johnny, his smile warm and open. They turned to watch the Patrón stamp towards them, every second step punctuated by the sharp stab of his cane on the tiled floor. The Patrón had a sheaf of paper in his cane-free hand.

"Hot damn," breathed Johnny. "That letter! Told you it was firin' him up. Wanna run for it? He'll never catch us."

"Do you know what this is?" demanded the Patrón, waving the papers at them. One detached itself from the sheaf and floated gently to the ground.

"I don't read other folks's letters, Murdoch," said Johnny, as virtuous as one of Padre Pietro's choirboys.

The Patrón glared. "It's the final Pinkerton report on their contacts with you two, that's what it is."

Cipriano bent to retrieve the loose sheet. The Pinkerton's unsleeping eye was printed prominently on the top. He saw the words _invoice attached for your convenience and earliest attention_ and handed the sheet over. This was one Pinkerton invoice that he thought the Patrón would pay without complaint. Possibly.

"Indeed?" said Scott, raising an eyebrow.

His hermano was even more sardonic. "Good readin', Murdoch?"

"You were in a Mexican prison!" said the Patrón, and Cipriano could almost hear his teeth gritting.

"He must mean you, little brother."

"Guess so. Don't reckon an Eastern Fancy Dan would know about ending up in jail."

"Give me time to get to know my provoking little brother. I have a feeling you're going to lead me astray."

The Patrón's nostrils whitened with temper, and not just because he wasn't getting their full attention. "Stop being a fool, Johnny. The Pinkerton agent said he found you just as you were about to be shot by a firing squad! Literally just as you were going to be shot!"

"Yeah. Lucky that, eh?" Johnny sounded unmoved, but the expression in his eyes was wary.

Scott took a sharp breath. He looked intently at his hermano and put his hand, very briefly, on Johnny's arm. Cipriano wondered whether it was to comfort Johnny or himself, but whatever was meant, the fingers that Johnny was tapping restlessly on his holster again were stilled when Scott touched him, as if his hermano's touch gentled the wildness in him. Cipriano took a few steps to one side. This probably wasn't for him to hear and it was best to put on some semblance of discretion. He could watch from a little distance and he had sharp hearing.

"You were in prison because you were helping some Mexican peasants rebel? Why?"

"Because the Rurales caught us?" offered Johnny.

The Patrón's mouth worked and thinned down into the hard line that had become all too common an expression in the hard, lonely years. "I meant, why were you helping them?"

Johnny shrugged. "They asked me to and God knows they needed it. Don Castañeda was takin' every last thing they had and comin' back for the empty sack. They didn't have a hope. Their kids were skinny as fence rails."

The Patrón waved the papers some more. "How could they afford you? The way I heard it, you're... you were an awfully expensive gun to hire."

"Well now," said Johnny, softly, "You know how expensive I am, old man. Hirin' my gun this time's costin' you one-third of this place. Seems a high price. Best one I ever made, anyways."

The Patrón snorted. "I am not hiring your gun, Johnny! Having both of you home at last isn't costing me anything that I wouldn't pay ten times over."

Johnny stared, his expression for once revealing his surprise.

His father nodded at him, acknowledging everything that was unsaid. "Still, I'd be interested to know how those peons could possibly afford to pay you."

"I hired out for short money."

"How short, brother?" asked Scott.

"They had nothin' left. I hired out for tamales and beans." Johnny grinned suddenly, ruefully. "It turned out to be beans, mostly."

"You could have been killed, son! Dear God, but you were only a minute away from it! It wasn't even your fight."

"It never is my fight until I sign up," said Johnny.

"Why this one?" asked Scott. "Why did you help them?"

"They were nice people," said Johnny. "They didn't deserve what Castañeda did to them and they couldn't afford more." He shrugged. "There's worse things to die for, I guess, and plenty of the poor bastards died in our little revolution, especially after someone ratted out on us. The Rurales are the real bastards. They're more banditos than real law and they're in the pay of the landowners, to put down any of the peons who try to rebel. They don't care who they kill or stuff into one of the hellholes they call prison."

"Watch your language," said the Patrón, automatically. "You should have told us."

"You're the one who says that the past is past, sir," said Scott reasonably. before Johnny could do more than stiffen. "I don't see that either of us was under any obligation to explain our movements before we came here. After all, what difference does it make now that Johnny was in prison or I was in a lady's boudoir when the Pinkerton agents delivered your invitation? What's important is that we came, surely."

"A lady's what?" queried Johnny, grinning.

"Precisely," said Scott, and grinned back, but there was a strained expression around his eyes and the banter wasn't coming easily.

"I only hope she was pretty, Boston."

"Very pretty. Unfortunately, we were interrupted."

Johnny's smile broadened. "So were we. But I was damned pleased to see that Pink, I can tell you. I was next up."

"I don't know how you can joke about it," said Scott, shaking his head.

Johnny shrugged, his smile unwavering. "Makes me glad that was one Pink I hadn't given the slip to. They've been chasin' after me for months."

"Did you know I was looking for you?" demanded the Patrón, astonished.

"I didn't know what it was about or who'd sent them, but I wasn't lettin' them close enough to ask. I knew it weren't to hire me. No-one would use Pinks for that. And no, I didn't think it might be you. Why would I?"

The Patrón looked weary, suddenly. "It really wasn't my choice she went, Johnny."

Johnny ducked his head to look at his boots with a fascination they didn't warrant. He let the Patrón's words lie there, unanswered. Instead he said, "Pinks aren't good for business but mostly they're real easy to dodge when you want to."

"Thank God this one found you, Johnny. I'd have hated to have missed the chance to know I had a little brother."

"Well, it was close."

"How long were you in there?"

"Three weeks or so, I reckon. Kinda lost track of the days, after a while. There's no light and no clocks." He rubbed at his chest, where the huge bruise had been. "I kinda measured time by other things. They was regular about that."

After a moment in which both the Patrón and his elder son looked almost murderous, the Patrón sighed. "Well, I suppose it explains the bruises and why you were—" He broke off.

"I guess it does," said Johnny, flatly. "The Rurales don't like half-breeds much either."

"I wish the damned Pinkertons had found you sooner," said the Patrón. He crumpled the invoice in his hand. "I wish you'd let them find you sooner."

"Yeah," said Johnny. "Can't change the past, Old Man. It's done with, you said."

"I was wrong," said the Patrón. "And even if we're done with the past, it's not done with us."

Johnny let out a little huff of laughter, but there was no mirth in it. "Yeah," he said again. "We just have to play out the hand, Murdoch."

The Patrón's smile was reluctant. "Yes."

Johnny nodded and looked away and Scott stepped in to fill the silence. "You know, Johnny, I'll admit that I thought the dime novels made unlikely heroes out of gunfighters, but that's really something, helping people like that. It would make a good plot for a novel, you know."

"You gonna write it?"

"If I ever understand you well enough," said Scott, rather dryly. "Capturing you in words is hard enough, little brother, without trying to work out why you do things."

"Me? It's simple." Johnny opened his eyes very wide. "Sometimes you strap your gun on for a third of a ranch and sometimes it's for beans. It's all work."

Scott shook his head, smiling and Johnny laughed. For the first time that Cipriano had seen, he reached out and touched his hermano. He got a hand around Scott's neck and pulled him briefly towards himself, ruffling Scott's hair. It wasn't a full hug, but it was something; a gesture and a promise, maybe.

"You write it and I'll tell you what you get wrong."

"That'll be a job of work, all right," said Scott, but he was smiling.

The Patrón sighed, very loudly, and stuffed the report into his shirt pocket. "We have a round-up to plan, boys, and that will be real work. Let's get to it." He paused, and added, "Now you're stronger, Johnny, we'll go into Green River tomorrow and get that deed signed at the lawyer's. You'll be fine in the wagon."

"I'll be even finer on Barranca," said Johnny. "I can ride, Murdoch. It's only an hour or so, and we'll only be going at that sedate trot the Doc's so keen on."

"Barranca?" Scott grinned. "I thought you wondered what sort of name that was for a horse?"

"Well," said Johnny, with a rueful smile. "It kinda fits him. I'm ridin' him tomorrow, Murdoch, okay? Me and Scott will both ride. Right, brother?"

Scott stared, then the smile broadened until all the Eastern reserve was gone. He looked delighted, as if Johnny had given him a present of something he'd always wanted. "Right."

The Patrón, surprisingly, didn't argue. The expression on his usually stern face softened and he nodded his agreement, giving his sons a smile that left both of them looking faintly surprised. Cipriano understood, though, and the tight feeling in his chest that he'd had since he'd explained the curse of blue eyes to Scott, eased and stopped aching; a warmth spread there instead, filling him until he had to turn aside and wipe his eyes. The dust must have blown into them.

He looked out across the land that was as much his home as the Patrón's and knew it was safe now and that the scars would heal at last. When he got home that night, he told himself, he would kiss both of his Bella's hands in homage. She had said, his clever and lovely wife, that what would matter wouldn't be just what Johnny said, but what he did to show what his intentions were, to show who he wanted to be. Bella was, as always, a perceptive and wise woman. She would understand, as he and the Patrón understood, that both the sons were home at last.

Because Johnny Madrid had never had or known about or wanted a horse called Barranca. But Johnny Lancer? Johnny Lancer had fought for one.

And because Johnny Madrid had no brothers, only an Eastern stranger called Boston. But Johnny Lancer? Johnny Lancer had a brother called Scott.

x

x

"I've been thinking," said Bella, as Cipriano halted the wagon in the shade of the oak trees in the square outside the church.

"A dangerous pastime," remarked Cipriano, lifting her down and setting her on her feet.

She dusted down her Sunday-best silks; there had been no rain for a couple of weeks now and the roads were dry and dust-blown. "Juanito looked very handsome in his new white shirt, when he went with his hermano and papa to sign the agreement," she said. "He's going to turn the head of every girl in the Valley."

"Mmn," said Cipriano.

Bella unfurled her parasol and tilted it to shade herself, just so, slipping her left hand through Cipriano's proffered arm. "But it's too soon," she said. "He needs time to learn to be a son and a brother before he's distracted by learning to be a husband. Were you distracted, Cipriano?"

"I still am," said Cipriano, patting the little hand on his arm. "As you know."

She smiled her special, only-for-him smile. "Yes," she said. "So. I'll enjoy watching Juanito become a fine caballero and in a year or two perhaps, when he's settled and happy and Señor Lancer is less... less apprehensive, then I'll think again about who may make a suitable wife for him."

"I thought you had Maria-Cruz Baldomero in mind?"

Bella shrugged. "An owner of an estancia as fine and big as Lancer will look higher than a shopkeeper's niece."

Cipriano, one eye on the gaggle of women on the church steps, wondered if anyone had told Señora de Baldomero that. She had just seen them crossing the square and was bearing down on them, her capacious silk dress billowing around her equally capacious frame. He mentioned her approach to Bella. "She looks very excited," he commented.

"She must have heard about the partnership," said Bella. "It will be all over the Valley by now."

That, Cipriano did not doubt. He had seen the power of women when it came to communication and was in awe of it.

"My dear Señora de Roldán! My dear, dear Señora! How happy I am to see you again!"

Bella smiled her most Isabella-like smile. "Good day," she said primly, closing down her parasol in order to press briefly only one of the hands held out to her.

"My dear! What an exciting time!" Señora de Baldomero affected not to notice Bella's coolness. "Both Señor Lancer's sons home and joining him at the estancia! How pleased you must be."

"But of course," said Señora Isabella,

"I'm so looking forward to the fiesta… there is to be a fiesta, you said?"

"I believe so," said Bella. "Señorita Teresa calls it a 'social', but we will celebrate with all our friends."

"Maria-Cruz is so looking forward to it, I can't tell you! She can barely sleep, she's so excited about meeting Señor Lancer's sons." Señora de Baldomero laughed, and added, archly. "Both his fine sons."

Bella frowned, as if in bewilderment. "Maria-Cruz?"

This time the Señora faltered. "But…" She took a deep breath and capitulated completely. "But Señora Isabella, you know Maria-Cruz! Señor Baldomero's niece!"

"Maria-Cruz," said Bella, pensively. "Ah yes, of course. Your niece, Maria-Cruz. A pretty girl, I remember. I'm sure that if she comes to the fiesta, Señora, there will be no shortage of respectable young men to dance with her."

"Señora Isabella!" said the Baldomero woman, faintly.

"Do please excuse us, Señora, but the warning bells are sounding and Señor Roldán is eager to get to Mass—" (which piety was news to Cipriano) "—so perhaps we may speak later?"

And Bella smiled her cool smile again, dismissing Señora de Baldomero's repeated bleatings of "But Señora Isabella!" with a nod, and got Cipriano moving with the slightest of tugs on his arm.

Cipriano paused on the steps of the church and looked down into his wife's lovely face. Bella beamed up at him.

"I think she knows, now," she said, "that she's too late. That will teach her to think Juanito isn't respectable enough."

Cipriano laughed. "Ah, Isabella Muñoz de Roldán! You're quite magnificent!"

"I know," his Bella said, her mouth curving until he wanted to kiss it, right there on the church steps. "I know."

/End


End file.
